Though it has been suggested that only women’s wellbeing is at risk to osteoporosis, men can also suffer from the bone disease and a new study suggests that bone-strengthening drugs called bisphosphonates can have the same beneficial effect on older men at risk for fractures from osteoporosis as they do for women.
According to Dr Robert Recker, president of the National Osteoporosis Foundation, who had no part in the study, ‘We have ignored the problem in men. Half of women over 40 will have an osteoporotic fracture before they die and about 25 percent of men will, too, so it’s a substantial problem.’ However, just as in women, there are ways to reduce the risk in men, and though the study only showed that one drug called zoledronic acid (Reclast) significantly reduced backbone breaks in men suffering from osteoporosis, Recker said, ‘it’s likely that all bisphosphonates are also effective in men.’
The researchers explained that the bisphosphonates in Reclast work by building bone mass. The reason the researchers only looked at this one drug was because its maker, Novartis Pharma, funded the study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and led by Dr. Steven Boonen, a professor of medicine at Leuven University in Belgium.
The team recruited nearly 1200 men, between the ages of 50 and 85, who were at risk for osteoporosis and randomly assigned them to either intravenous infusions of Reclast or an inactive placebo. As vitamin D is considered vital for bone health, both groups also took vitamin D supplements. Then the team spent two years looking for fractures of the vertebrae — the small bones that make up your backbone.
The results were that there was an almost 2% rate of fractures among men receiving Reclast, whilst the rate of fractures in men who were given the placebo was roughly 5%. The researchers say that this is a 67% reduction in the risk of fractures for men receiving Reclast.
They also found that men receiving Reclast had fewer moderate-to-severe vertebral fractures, or other forms of fractures, and higher bone mineral density, than those on the placebo. Bone mineral density is a key measure of fracture risk. The team concluded, ‘although our findings with zoledronic acid [Reclast] do not imply that all data on drugs for osteoporosis in women can be extrapolated to men, our study should provide the confidence to proceed.’
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