bone-density tests even before age
50. I was such a prime candidate, and my doctor needed to have a baseline understanding of where my bones were and to watch where they were going to end up. I feel strongly that coming in and being armed with information is just essential today.
instance, are you getting enough calcium? Is your body absorbing vitamin D? Are you getting exercise? Are you eating right? Do you smoke—and if you do, you should stop for many reasons, certainly for bone health. Before you progress to osteoporosis, you should look at all of these things.
If you’re being treated for anything, a pharmaceutical should be the last resort. All of these other things should first be tried. But with osteoporosis, even if you eat right all of your life, even if you take calcium, and you exercise and do all of these things right, chances are if it’s in your genetic makeup, you might hold it off for
estrogen, change, and you begin to lose more bone than your body can build. Depending on how much bone you’re losing and how dense your bones are to begin with, your bones can get to such dangerously thin levels that they’re like wet chalk. And you could experience a fracture of your hip or your thigh just by sitting back on a park bench or picking up a bag of groceries.
I got my first bone-density test in my late 40s—primarily because I was such a prime candidate:
I was small, Caucasian, I have it in my family history. But it is a silent disease. Even though you may not be small and Caucasian, you may very well still have osteoporosis. And 20% of the diagnosed cases are men.
“OLDER WOMEN HAVE SO MUCH IMPORTANT INFORMATION TO GIVE TO
THEIR CHILDREN, THEIR GRANDCHILDREN, THEIR COMMUNITIES AND THE
WORLD. IT’S SO INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT THAT THEY STAY HEALTHY.”
We still live in an environment that doesn’t pay as much attention to prevention as it does to caring for you after it’s too late. For instance, $18 billion in this country is spent in osteoporosis-related expenses. In other words, once you get a fracture, the cost of taking care of that fracture—for nursing care, hospital care, whatever it might be—is $18 billion of unnecessary expenses. The cost of getting bone-density tests and being treated is so much less.
awhile, but eventually you are probably going to get it. But if you are diagnosed with it, it can be very, very effectively treated. You have to take that treatment seriously, and you have to take it for the rest of your life.
GH: Who is at risk for osteoporosis? SF: You can be at risk if you take certain medications that can lead to calcium and mineral depletion. If you are taking a treatment for a cancer, for instance, no matter what age you are, you could lose bone density.
PHOTO: ALBERTO E. RODRIGUEZ/GET TY IMAGES
SF: Yes, osteopenia is the condition right before osteoporosis. That’s when the patient or the health-care provider would know to be watching out for you and looking out for other things. For
SF: It goes hand-in-hand with premenopause, postmenopause— all of that goes together. It connects very closely with a lot of health issues for women. The loss of hormones in your body quite obviously affects bone turnover. Bone is a living thing, like tissue, in that it keeps itself healthy by replenishing itself. Your body sheds bone and rebuilds bone. When you reach a certain age, your hormone levels, including
GH: How can children help their older moms maintain bone health? SF: The greatest thing you can do as a loving child of an older woman is to urge her to get a bone-density test. Urge her to know what’s happening and, when she chooses a treatment, to stick with it.
CLICK To read more from our exclusive TO IT
interview with Sally Field, see this article at GreatHealthMag.com.
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