the BABY BOOMER BODY BOOK ©

THE COMPLETE HEALTH REFERENCE
FOR OUR GENERATION
BY
BRIAN PECK, M.D., DAAPM, BCFM, FAADEP

CHAPTER 25

Judy Parker was worried.  Really worried.  When her 78-year-old mother did not answer the phone all morning, she drove right over to her apartment.  She was horrified when she found Mom on the floor in a pool of her own urine.  She had fallen and she could not get up.

The nightmare of ambulance, emergency room, x-rays, blood tests, and unfamiliar doctors went on for 36 hours.  It had taken that long before Mrs. Levine had finally been taken to the operating room where her fractured hip had been replaced.  By now she was completely disoriented by her strange and unfamiliar surroundings.  Mom had always been totally “with it”.  To see her now, not even knowing where she was, was the worst thing Judy could imagine.

Then, four days later, while in the midst of trying to find a convalescent home that was clean enough and close enough to where she lived, Judy, forty-eight years old, went to the gynecologist, Dr. Cavelli, for her annual visit.  She was mortified to find that she was only five feet two inches tall.  She had always thought that she was an inch and a half taller.  Of course, her height was last measured during her college physical, thirty years earlier. 

The doctor’s PA (physician assistant), Wendy Parsons, told Judy about osteoporosis.  It was pretty obvious that was Mom’s problem.  Judy could see herself looking just like Mom in thirty years or so.  It was not a good feeling, especially with Mom in a hospital bed, about to go to a convalescent home.

Osteoporosis (OP) is a condition in which the bones become weaker than normal due to loss of calcium, the mineral that makes teeth and milk white.  As the largest component of normal bone, calcium accounts for its structural strength, like the iron atoms in a steel girder.

Bone is much more than just a simple support system, like the framework of a building.  The skeleton is the body’s repository of calcium.  Without calcium, none of our cells would operate at all, including nerve cells, which make up the brain and sensory organs, and muscle cells, without which we could not move.  Ionized calcium (atoms with an electrical charge, like the salt you put in a child’s vaporizer) must be present in the cell’s surface membrane to conduct electricity, which enables cells to communicate with each other, like nerves must communicate with muscle.

Our bodies have a complex system of checks and balances to insure that our serum ionized calcium level (the amount dissolved in our blood) is always regulated to very close tolerances.  This level is so important that our calcium regulatory system of hormones and chemicals, if not supplied with enough dietary calcium, will continually leach it from the skeleton in   an effort to maintain the proper levels, even if it means the bones might become osteoporotic.

OP can occur in both men and women. However, the onset is much more rapid in women, especially soon after menopause. OP in men is discussed fully in Chapter 27.

The clinical manifestations (the symptoms we report and the signs our doctors find) are due to loss of structural strength. People with OP shrink, develop kyphosis (a bowed back), suffer chronic bone pain, and easily fracture their hips, backbones, and wrists. The tragedy is that OP can be so easily prevented.

The outer surface of our bones is called cortical bone (cortex, or outer layer). This outer surface is hard and thick and comprises about twenty percent of the total. Eighty percent is trabecular bone (spongy bone, or marrow). We form our blood cells in the little spaces created by the marrow’s matrix. Like the complex latticed design of skyscraper girders, these crisscrossed bits of bone provide immense structural strength. When enough calcium is lost, these tiny individual bone bridges shrink, and the bones can no longer support our weight (Figure 1, also see Chapter 27, Figure 1).

Now Judy was worried about herself, too. How would she know if it were happening to her? She was only forty-eight, but she knew so much more than she did just a few days ago. It seemed so insidious. She never even knew it was happening to Mom. How could she have been so ignorant?

And now that Judy thought about it, some of her friends did not look quite the way they used to either. Her friend Joanie seemed a little dumpy. Was it real, or imaginary? Maybe she was amplifying what she was learning about Mom. After all, her friends were forty-eight, not seventy-eight.

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