Osteoporotic Fractures and Children In Need

The headline article on the BMJ website this week concerns a study carried out into predicting the risk of osteoporotic fractures in men and women in the UK.

Hippesly-Cox J etal. Predicting Risk of Osteoporotic Fracture in mena nd women in England and Wales: prospective derivation and validation of QFracture Scores. BMJ 2009;339:b4229

The study altogether covered a massive 24,350 diagnoses of osteoporotic fractures in women and there was a huge difference between frequency in men (only 7,934 in men).
The following factors led to a significant increased risk of fracture in women:
HRT use, age, BMI, smoking status, alcohol use, family history of osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes, asthma, tricyclic antidepressants, history of falls, menopausal symptoms, chronic liver disease and other endocrine disorders.

The results of the study suggest that using a simple algorithm can be more useful at predicting risk of fracture in primary care populations in the UK. The algorithm is known as the QFractureScore and could be used to predict patients at high risk of sustaining a fracture.

Doc2Doc, a website set up to encourage doctors to discuss topical matters, express points of view etc is a site I use sometimes for material. I saw this week that they had provided a handy 'round-up' of whats been in the news this week. Here's what it says:

The BBC have reported tamiflu-resistant H1N1 virus strains in Wales. There have already been five incidents in Cardiff of person to person transmission where this has been the case.
Researchers have shown in the journal 'Biological Psychiatry' that patients who are victims of child abuse actually show premature ageing. This is due to accelerated reduction of telomeres within cells.

Finally on a good note, the BBC's children in need event this year has raised more than 20 million pounds for charity.How good is that! Apparently Comic Relief raised 80 million pounds earlier in the year! Alot of the money goes towards important causes such as youth support services for victims of racism, support centres for visually impaired children, and play centres for children with terminal or life-threatening illnesses.