BALTIMORE—Rheumatologists may not think about osteoporosis on a daily basis, but they should, said Dr. Karl Insogna, the Ensign Professor of Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine and director of the Yale Bone Center in New Haven, Conn., in his recent lecture at the Maryland Society for the Rheumatic Diseases. With approximately 75 million…
The American Medical Association’s (AMA) RVS Update Committee (RUC) and the Current Procedural Terminology Committee (CPT) meet six times per year to review resource costs and code descriptors for provider services. At these meetings, the ACR is represented by several volunteers and staff to provide a voice in shaping Medicare policy for rheumatology. The first…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Romosozumab improves bone mineral density (BMD) in men with osteoporosis, but safety concerns are holding up its approval in the U.S. Up to 2 million men in the U.S. have osteoporosis, and up to 13 million have osteopenia, researchers note in a report online June 20 in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology…
New research suggests circulating hsa-miR-122-5p and hsa-miR-4516 may become diagnostic biomarkers for osteoporosis. The study found the presence of these microRNAs were associated with osteoporotic fragility fractures and reduced bone mineral density…
CHICAGO—A 75-year-old woman with low bone density, who has had a fracture and has other risk factors for fracture, is treated with the bisphosphonate alendronate. After five years on the drug she comes back, wondering: Should I stop taking the drug? She’s had no additional fractures. Her bone density has improved, but her lumbar spine…
Preventing adverse outcomes in individuals who have rheumatic diseases is a daily goal for rheumatologists. For example, rheumatologists prescribe medications and perform screening to prevent erosions in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), renal failure in systemic lupus erythematosus and flares across all diseases. Many of these actions are classified as secondary or tertiary prevention, because individuals have…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Various image analysis techniques show sex-specific patterns of bone deterioration at the hip, suggesting that men and women should be assessed differently for hip fracture risk, researchers say. “One major contribution of this work is the integration of data-driven computational anatomy approaches, which showed that proximal femur fragility linked to fracture seems…
Denosumab is now approved to treat adults with glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis…
(Reuters Health)—Patients with acute pain from osteoporosis damage to the spine don’t experience any more relief from surgery to inject cement into cracked or broken vertebrae than they would with a sham procedure, a recent trial in The Netherlands suggests. All of the patients in the experiment had compression fractures, which can happen when osteoporosis…
New research has linked alendronate to reduced cardiovascular death in hip fracture patients…