Conventional assessment strategies identify more postmenopausal women with osteoporosis

The U.S. Preventative Service Task Force recommendation of osteoporosis screening for women younger than 65 years was moderately better than chance alone, but inferior to conventional strategies, according to results of a recently published study.

Researchers examined data from 5,165 Women’s Health Initiative participants aged 50 years to 64 years. They assessed sensitivity, specificity and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) using U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF), Osteoporosis Self-Assessment Tool (OST) and Simple Calculated Osteoporosis Risk Estimate (SCORE) strategies to discriminate between patients with and without femoral neck T-scores less than or equal to -2.5.

According to the results, sensitivity for identifying femoral neck T-scores at -2.5 or less was 34.1% for USPSTF, 74% for SCORE and 79.8% for OST, while specificity was 85.8% for USPSTF, 70.8% for SCORE and 66.3% for OST and AUC was 0.60 for USPSTF, 0.72 for SCORE and 0.73 for OST. Researchers found the USPSTF strategies identified about one third of women aged 50 years to 64 years with femoral neck T-scores at -2.5 or less.

Reference:

Crandall CJ. J Bone Miner Res. 2014;doi:10.1002/jbmr.2174.

Disclosure: Crandall received support from the University of California, Los Angeles Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.