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The Epidemiology of Osteoporosis,
Professor Cyrus Cooper, professor
of rheumatology and director,
MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology
Unit, University of Southampton
and professor of
musculoskeletal science,
University of Oxford in the UK.
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Osteoporosis has been
recognized throughout antiquity.
In the left hand, bottom
corner of this slide
you see a radiograph of a section
of spine removed from a Saxon barrow
in the 8th century, and
you see quite clearly
that there's a vertical
compression fracture.
Such fractures were reported by
Hippocrates more than 400 years
before Christ and have been
reported throughout antiquity.
In the 1820s and 1850s
the term osteoporosis
was coined to indicate the
pathological appearance of bone
when it had lost bone
volume and bone structure.
Sir Astley Cooper documented
the most frequent fracture
associated with osteoporosis
in those days, hip fracture.
He showed that it was more
common in women than men
and he showed that it increased
in frequency with age.
But our real understanding
of osteoporosis
stems from research undertaken
over the last 75 years,
and principally since 1990, when we
have developed a uniform definition
of osteoporosis based on
bone density measurement,
developed a number of
antiresorptive and formation
stimulating therapies
against osteoporosis,
and developed coherent
risk assessment strategies.
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The step change for this was the WHO
definition of osteoporosis, which
is shown in this next slide,
that was coined in 1994
and characterized osteoporotic bone
density as 2.5 standard deviations
or more below the young normal mean.
And it was a disorder
characterized by low bone mass
and microarchitectural
deterioration of bone tissue,
leading to an increased
risk of fracture.
