AsianScientist (Oct. 26, 2016) – Australian research has revealed that genetic profiling can help predict the risk of an individual breaking a bone through osteoporosis. The findings were accepted for publication in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.
Osteoporosis is dubbed ‘the silent thief’ because bone loss occurs without obvious symptoms until a bone is broken. For this reason, one key goal of osteoporosis research is to identify those who have a high risk of breaking a bone, with the ultimate aim of preventing avoidable fractures.
Professor Tuan Nguyen from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and University of Technology Sydney, who led the new research, explained that the researchers can now classify an individual’s risk of breaking a bone much more reliably when taking genetic factors into account alongside clinical factors.
The new findings arise from Garvan’s Dubbo Osteoporosis Epidemiology Study, which has enabled the development of the Garvan Fracture Risk Calculator (GFRC), used clinically to determine an individual’s risk of osteoporotic fracture. The GFRC uses clinical risk factors (age, sex, history of falls and fractures, and bone density) to assess an individual’s fracture risk.
For each of the over 1,400 individuals studied, the researchers looked at whether a bone had been broken over a ten-year period. They then assessed whether the GFRC had correctly predicted the risk of fracture and whether the use of the genetic risk score could improve the accuracy of the GFRC’s prediction.
The researchers found that when the genetic risk score was used with the GFRC, the correct classification of individuals as high or low fracture risk was increased by 12 percent over and above that of the traditional clinical risk factors, which together correctly classify up to 80 percent of the studied individuals into high- and low-risk categories.
Nguyen noted that the findings overturn long-held skepticism in the bone health field about the role of genetics in the clinical management of osteoporosis.
The article can be found at: Ho-Le et al. (2016) Prediction of Bone Mineral Density and Fragility Fracture by Genetic Profiling.
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Source: Garvan Institute of Medical Research; Photo: Pixabay.
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