Relationship between body mass index and osteoporosis

Abstract

Introduction. Osteoporosis is a metabolic skeletal disease characterized by bone mineral density reduction, which may lead to an increased risk of bone fractures. Obesity is a condition of excessive body fat that causes or aggravates many public health problems. As it is easy to be measured, body mass index is widely used as an index of the degree of obesity. Material and Methods. The study included 1.372 female orthopedic patients between the ages of 30 to 79 years who visited the Clinical Centre of Vojvodina in Novi Sad to have a dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) examination in the period from March, 2010 to June, 2013. The following anthropometric data were collected: body mass index, body weight, height, dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry T-score and bone mineral density (BMD), as well as some other data. Results. The mean age was 62.08 years, the mean weight was 73.59 kg and the mean height was 1.6 m. There were 392 participants in the group of normal body mass index, 14 participants were underweight, and 966 were overweight and obese. In the overweight and obese group, 25.25% participants had osteoporosis, 35.4% had osteopenia and 39.33% had the normal T-score. In the normal body mass index group, 42.34% of the participants had osteoporosis, 29.3% had osteopenia and 28.31 had the normal T-score. In the underweight group, 57.14% of the participants had osteoporosis, 21.42% had osteopenia and 21.42% had the normal T-score. Conclusion. No strong correlation between body mass index and bone mineral density was found in our study, but it is obvious that there was a stronger correlation between body mass index and bone mineral density of the total hip than between body mass index and bone mineral density of the lumbar spine.