Acute Medicine | Medicine of the elderly | Criteria for diagnosing osteoporosis

Criteria for Diagnosing Osteoporosis
Session Overview
Description
This session discusses the diagnosis and treatment of osteoporosis.

Learning Objectives
By the end of this session you will be able to:

• State the diagnostic criteria for osteoporosis

Falls and osteoporosis are separate conditions but part of the same problem: around 14,000 people die each year in the UK as a result of an osteoporotic hip fracture. Nearly all of these are in older people who have fallen.

Part of understanding falls is understanding osteoporosis – the assessment of a patient with falls always involves asking about previous fractures and starting treatment for osteoporosis whenever it is diagnosed.

Osteoporosis is often known as ‘the silent disease’ because there may be no symptoms at all until the first fracture.