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Osteoporosis Bone Assessment
OSTEOPOROSIS
• Leads to 1.5 million fractures per year
• Affects more than 50% of healthy American women aged 30-40 who are likely to develop vertebral fractures as they age
• It is important to identify individuals currently losing bone at an accelerated rate so that effective treatment can begin before significant bone loss has occurred.
Advantages of Urinary Bone Resorption Testing:
• Biochemical markers are convenient and inexpensive dynamic measures of bone turnover.
• Biomechanical markers provide immediate information on the rate of bone loss, thus
helping to predict future losses.
• Static markers of bone mass, such as photon absorptiometry (bone scans), help to diagnose osteoporosis by establishing the amount of bone that has already been lost. They do not provide data on the rate of loss.
• Bone scans, unlike biochemical markers, are inconvenient for regular monitoring of therapies due to invasiveness and expense.
Measuring Bone Resorption:
Pyridinium crosslinks are stabilisers of collagen molecules. Bone collagen contains both pyridinoline (PYD), which is reflective of collagen loss of all types, and its component deoxypyridinoline (DPD), which specifically reflects bone collagen.
Presence in the urine of higher than normal amounts of PYD and DPD indicate a rapid rate of bone loss.
Crosslink excretion is greatly increased in patients with osteoporosis, as well as in a number of other conditions.
These include Paget’s disease, primary hyperparathyroidism and osteomalacia. Measurement of PYD crosslinks has also proven useful in arthritic diseases, connective tissue disorders, cancer metastasis and alcoholic bone disease.
• Specimen Requirement:
15ml of first morning urine
• Before Taking this Test:
• No special preparation required
• See instructions inside test kit for urine collection
Bone Resorption Assessment provides an accurate assessment of the rate of bone turnover in an
individual. Testing allows the practitioner to identify those more likely to develop osteoporosis, to
intervene before significant loss has occurred, and to monitor the efficacy of treatment regimens.
