Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're discussing bone health. How strong is your skeleton? It's a tough question.

And often we'll find out the answer when a bone breaks. The reality is many of us have weak bones.

Osteoporosis affects one in four people over 50, significantly increasing their risk of painful and debilitating fractures.

So what can you do to keep your bones strong as you age?

Professor Tim Specter and Professor Cyrus Cooper explain how you can tailor your lifestyle to maintain a strong skeleton.

Osteoporosis is the commonest bone disorder worldwide, and it's associated with reduced bone density,

a disruption of the microarchitectural content of bone, and an increased risk of fracture. The fractures

that typically arise from osteoporosis are fractures of the hip, the spine, and the distal forearm

or wrist. Those three fracture sites account for about half of all fractures in older people,

and the other half are from all the other sites combined around the skeleton.

The places you're talking about feel to me like not the most common places

that people tend to break their bones when their children or in their 20s or 30s?

So that's exactly correct.

In their 20s and 30s, trauma plays a much bigger role than bone density.

So this is like falling out of a tree or...

Having a road traffic accident.

Breaking your nose.

Yeah.

Whereas as you get to later life, particularly for women above the age of 50,

up to the average age of menopause, and men more so after age 70, low trauma or in fact

absent trauma is associated with many of the fractures and those truly are

...