Osteoporosis (%) (National Only)
Of the 10 million Americans estimated to have osteoporosis, eight million are women.1 Osteoporosis can cause many health problems, particularly for older women. It is a major risk factor for hip fracture, a health problem that often has serious consequences.2
What percentage of women age 50 and older have osteoporosis?
Research did not reveal any reliable data on the prevalence of osteoporosis by state. Therefore, the Report Card includes only national information about this disease. Neither the states nor the nation are graded on this indicator.3
Data Source: Osteoporosis (National Only) (%), 2010.
EXPLANATION: The prevalence of osteoporosis in the non-institutionalized civilian population age 50 and older is based on World Health Organization (WHO) diagnostic criteria. Estimates of low femoral bone density are based on dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) measurements of femoral BMD. The 2002 prevalence is based on data projected from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES III).
SOURCE: National Osteoporosis Foundation, America's Bone Health: The State of Osteoporosis and Low Bone Mass in Our Nation (Washington: National Osteoporosis Foundation, 2002). The population denominator used to determine prevalence comes from the 2009 Population estimates: U.S. Census Bureau and National Center for Health Statistics, Estimates of the July 1, 2000-July 1, 2009 United States resident population from the Vintage 2009 postcensal series by year, county, age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin (available at http://www.census.gov/popest/national/).
Footnotes
1 National Osteoporosis Foundation, “Fast Facts, ” 2007, available at http://www.nof.org/osteoporosis/diseasefacts.htm.
2 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, “Osteoporosis” (Atlanta: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhanes/databriefs/osteoporosis.pdf
3 The Healthy People 2010 goal is reduce the number of osteoporosis cases to eight percent of adults age 50 and older (when applied to women). Healthy People 2010, Objective 2-9. However, because the Report Card grading methodology is based on the states’ performance on each indicator, as explained in the Methodology section, it is not possible to grade the nation on this indicator in the absence of state data in a manner that is consistent with the rest of the Report Card.
