A Novel Post-Menopausal Osteoporosis Screening Tool

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Osteoporosis has a significant impact on the United States population, with more than 25 million people affected by the disease. Often times, this predisposed degenerative disease leads to about 1.3 million fractures per year with the costs being in excess of 10 billion dollars. This revised grant application will develop and evaluate a novel and yet economical technique, which has the potential to be used as a non-invasive and objective tool for detecting indications of spine fractures in post-menopausal osteoporotic women. The proposed non-invasive technique can provide critical information about the quality of the bone that can supplement traditional DEXA bone mineral density (BMD) measurements. The post-menopausal osteoporosis technique will utilize miniature skin mounted accelerometers to capture the changes in effective damping capacities and other mechanical properties (including brittleness) of natural shock absorbers of the human musculoskeletal systems (soft tissues including muscles and trabecular bone which has significant elastic capacity in healthy bones), associated with heel strike induced force propagation. The literature lacks information regarding how osteoporosis affects natural shock absorbers. The potential of success for the proposed technique's ability to capture shock absorption properties of osteoporotic bones is high since preliminary studies from our group have successfully quantitated natural shock absorbers of the musculoskeletal system in another type of degenerative musculoskeletal diseases i.e. osteoarthritic patients. The proposed technique is totally non-invasive, objective, simple and quick to administer. The proposed study will focus on measuring natural shock absorption properties of postmenopausal osteoporosis with and without fractures and supplement information gathered from BMD measurements. Once the proposed technique shows promise future prospective study will allow determination of the effectiveness of the technique to diagnose individuals at risk for fracture, pre-clinically.