Welcome to episode 58 of the Physician Assistant Boards.com podcast and today's topic is going to be on osteoporosis, a very boring and dreadful subject, but something that you need to know for the boards and

something you definitely need to know for clinical practice.

Osteoporosis is incredibly common and it was estimated that about 10 million

people were diagnosed with osteoporosis a few

years back. So incredibly common. Now what's interesting is that a lot of

us place a lot of priority in trying to diagnose osteoporosis in women, but the reality is

39% of all osteoporetic fractures actually occur in males.

So don't forget your male population when looking for osteoporosis. It can still happen

in males, right? So osteoporosis, let's dive right into what it actually is and the definition is incredibly simple.

Osteoporosis is a skeletal disease that results in low bone density.

That's all it is.

And these patients because they have this low bone

density, are going to be at increased risk for fracture, and usually it's going to

be the vertebral fracture that you're going to be looking for. Now it's usually going

to affect women over 50 but like I stated

don't forget the male population. Fractures still occur in males due to

osteoporosis, but you're usually going to be looking for a vertebral fracture and over

women and over the age of 50 and you're going to be looking for risk factors.

And these risk factors are going to include smoking, secondary amenaria, and glucocorticoid use.

So we have our profile that we're looking for.

We're going to be looking for a woman that's over 50 and we're going to diagnose this using something called a Dexa scan and it's going to be a Dexa scan of the hip

Now as far as guidelines go you're going to screen everybody, every woman, over the age of 65, and the reason being,

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