Osteoporosis: Symptoms and Diagnostic
What are the symptoms occur?
Osteoporosis has no symptoms, it does not hurt or cause any change in itself. However, very fragile place in the bones, appear with great frequency bone fractures, which are those that affect the symptoms in these patients. The most common fractures in osteoporosis in postmenopausal women are vertebral fractures, which produce very sharp pains in the back and gradually lead to the development of deformities of the same, fundamentally progressive decrease in size by crushing vertebrae. This pain may give way to a dull ache and more continuous, produced by microfractures, which is often the symptom leading to diagnosis. Osteoporosis of the elderly typically produced in long bone fractures, especially in the wrist, and even more in the femur, being responsible for the typical hip fractures in the elderly.
How is it diagnosed?
There are no alterations to the basic analysis that allow the diagnosis. Even when the diagnosis is obtained through the study of bone biopsy in practice using different radiological techniques for diagnosis, who are also useful in assessing disease progression and response to treatment. Most are nonspecific plain radiographs of affected bones, which show osteoporosis once it is already quite advanced. In recent years we have introduced different models of densitometers, which are capable of measuring bone density for a given pattern.