Two-thirds of women receiving medication for osteoporosis potentially did not need treatment, according to a retrospective cohort study published online. In fact, half of these women with possibly inappropriate prescriptions were younger and without risk factors that would have indicated screening, found Joshua J. Fenton, MD, MPH, from the University of California-Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, and colleagues.
"In our population, nearly one-third of the women had non-main-site osteoporosis, which was disproportionately attributable to lateral lumbar spine osteoporosis," the authors write. "These results suggest that either physicians are unaware of International Society for Clinical Densitometry guidelines that lateral lumbar spine bone mineral density should not be used for osteoporosis diagnosis or they assume that osteoporosis observed at any site warrants treatment." The…
