Osteoporosis
April 14th 2006 00:01
Which is which? The bone on the right is less dense and has less bone mass, it has osteoporosis.
Healthy Living Osteoporosis
Osteoporosis comes from the words osteo, meaning bone, por, meaning porous and osis which is disease. So, this condition is a porous bone disease - it is the wasting away of the inner bone matrix inside the bone itself. It is not to be confused with osteoarthritis, which is the degeneration of cartilage between the joints.
In osteoporosis, the loss of bone mass makes bones so porous and weakened that they become deformed and prone to fracture. In both men and women, bone mass starts to decrease at about the age of 40, and continually decreases from then on. Once women reach menopause, the decreased production of oestrogen can lead to osteoporosis.
To reduce the chances of osteoporosis, make sure you have a lot of calcium in your diet, and exercise regularly. Weight bearing exercise assists in the strengthening of and an increase in bone mass.
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Comment by Ricardo
About osteoporosis you might want to go into more detail on [I]how[/l] to prevent osteoporosis. You say that we should 'have a lot of calcium in our diet' - how can we do this? Should calcium supplements be purchased, what are the main sources of calcium? And also, you must emphasise the fact that women are significantly higher risk of early (earlier) onset of osteoporosis due to decreased calcium levels caused by menopause.
Also, we must exercise regularly - but how long (time, frequency)?, what type? (type) how hard? (intensity). Especially in the case of the elderly, one cannot simply go out and exercise and participate in weight bearing exercise due to other affecting medical conditions and a possibly sedentary lifestyle, therefore you might suggest the fundamentality of exercise prescription from the local GP or a trained exercise physiologist. From this you may want to blog about the importance of exericse prescription and what is involved.
Sorry about the detailed criticism, but people need to know details so that they can understand, especially with lifestyle diseases which are becoming ever so common.
Cheers mate.
Comment by RachDegab
If it was up to me mate, I'd be rambling on for ages about all those queries you had, I believe they are important for people to know.
But unfortunately, I dont have the time to write a longer blog. I can only work on it for a certain amount of time until it becomes unfeasable to continue.
Although, I will check and see if I can do less blogs a week and have more detailed ones instead, I'll see if I can do that.
Thanks for your criticism, and stay tuned.
Racheal
Comment by edward
Rocky's Running Diary