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Southwest Life Health And the West is History Community Travel

Feeling it in your bones

Osteoporosis can be the silent, stealthy killer inside you
Dr. Kim Furry of Durango Orthopedics is starting a long-term treatment program designed to treat osteoporosis and brittle bones in patients who have undergone surgery for fragility fractures.

While life depends on avoiding every kind of death, some fates – like drowning – are so gratuitously deadly they’d smite the strongest and most virtuous of us within instants.

By comparison, osteoporosis is an anathema, its fatal mechanisms so mundane, predictable and cumulative – if finally torturous – it’s almost philosophically unbearable to contemplate.

Imagine stumbling in your own bathroom, falling onto the tile and shattering your hip bones. With a weakened skeleton, even sneezing can spell spinal fractures. As soon as your bones – hips, wrists and spine – become so fragile they fracture easily, the most pedestrian tasks – bending over, coughing – become perilous ventures culminating in painful surgeries and months of convalescing, robbing one of the power to walk and even the will to live on.

“A lot of bone fractures take people’s lives, especially if they’re elderly, and it’s a hip fracture,” said Karen Zink, a women’s health nurse practitioner and owner of Southwest Women’s Health Associates. “Or they’ll never recover the ability to ambulate properly.

“Osteoporosis is asymptomatic for decades – until you have fracture. It’s silent. And the complications are potentially lethal.”

Dr. Kim Furry, an orthopedic surgeon with Durango Orthopedics, said many people don’t realize that a quarter of all men and fully one half of all women develop osteoporosis – among those who live to old age.

“Then, you can fall from standing height and fracture a hip, a wrist or your spine,” she said.

Dr. Jonathan DeLacey, a radiologist at Mercy Regional Medical Center, said one of the problems with osteoporosis is that without proper screenings, it’s a stealthy killer.

He routinely runs people through a machine that tests for bone density.

“Basically, you lie down on a table, and it takes an X-ray of your body that measures your bone density but using about a tenth of the radiation in an X-ray,” he said. “It’s the way we detect people’s risk of osteoporosis.”

He said it’s “definitely worth it for all women over 60 and all men over 70 to get screened. Many people only learn that they have low bone density and have osteoporosis once they’re 80 and come in after falling down or once they’ve coughed causing their spine to fracture.

“We want them to get diagnosed at 65, so they can have 15 years to prevent a fracture from totally debilitating them and affecting their quality of life.”

In Durango, many locals harbor a conception of “healthy living” that places special emphasis on sunscreen and physical activities, such as cycling and swimming. This conception of “healthy living” doesn’t capture the nuances of osteoporosis; indeed, it leaves even the most health-conscious individuals vulnerable to osteoporosis and unaware of their susceptibility.

DeLacey said cycling and swimming – while wonderful for the heart and lungs – do next to nothing for the bones because they don’t involve load-bearing.

“Cycling isn’t a weight-bearing activity, so the bones aren’t stimulated, meaning they won’t grow or replace themselves,” he said. “That’s actually one benefit of being overweight – it helps your bone density because you’re carrying that much more weight around when you walk anywhere.”

He clarified that doctors aren’t recommending obesity as a preventive measure.

“But to prevent bone loss, you should do something that is load-bearing,” he said. “I’m not saying you have to go out and play football. But just do something that involves lifting, like hiking – in Durango, the hiking is very good.”

Likewise, Furry said many locals are so determined to ward off skin cancer that they’ll lather themselves in sunscreen throughout the summer months, thereby sabotaging what little potential existed for the body to produce vitamin D, which is vital to bone health.

“In winter, people are wearing more clothes, all covered up when they’re outside, and it’s darker and the days are shorter,” she said. “Especially at these altitudes, where there’s less UVB light from the sun that gets absorbed into the body, that will affect bone health.”

Zink said beyond weight-bearing exercise, embracing a calcium-rich diet remains one of the best strategies for maintaining bone health for anyone older than 30, one of the watershed ages at which the body’s capacity to produce bone starts to rapidly deplete.

In the lifelong battle for healthy bones, grains are a treacherous enemy, Zink said.

“In the American diet, you have cereal for breakfast, then a sandwich for lunch. Then there’s pasta, bagels, cookies, cakes, pizza – this is basically a grain-based diet that in the last 30 years has made 2 billion people sick,” she said.

She said anyone interested in maintaining the use of their skeleton into old age should nix the endless iterations of bread in favor of calcium-rich foods like broccoli, salmon and almonds.

For a lot of people – especially those at higher risk of osteoporosis – it doesn’t hurt to take calcium supplements, either, she said.

Zink, DeLacey and Furry also said hormone therapies offer menopausal women another defense against the onslaught of osteoporosis.

DeLacey said smoking, heavy daily drinking, family history and prolonged steroid use also can mightily increase one’s chances of osteoporosis.

“In life, we all do wrong things, and you have choose your poison,” he said. “I’m an avid cyclist, even though it’s probably not good for my bone density. But cycling is probably OK as long as that’s the only disservice you’re doing to your health.”

Zink said there’s always some risk of dying.

“There’s a risk that we’ll go to the bed and die in the middle of the night from a heart attack, a risk that we’ll step off the curb and get run over. There’s no such thing as a risk-free life,” she said. “But there’s no reason that everyone shouldn’t have healthy bones when they die.”

cmcallister@durangoherald.com



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