Low Bone Density – no Laughing Matter

Of course, no one would go about suggesting that osteoporosis or other low bone density conditions were anything to take lightly. That little pun in the title of course exists for a reason. At the Yale School of Medicine, scientists have found that laugh lines in women over 40 can clue a doctor in to the kind of low bone density problems they may face at that point or in the future. In fact, they’ve found that the deeper a woman’s laugh lines are, the weaker bones might be.

Women have always had to depend on bone mineral density tests to know if they had a bone strength problem – an unaffordable and expensive option for many women, especially when the test could at any time come out negative. Now that doctors can learn how to hazard an educated guess at the state of a menopausal woman’s bones just by a look at her face and her pattern of aging, it should many more women the kind of treatment they need more quickly and easily.

So how exactly does research like this come about? In the study, the researchers, careful to select women who hadn’t had any cosmetic treatment done for laugh lines and wrinkles, used an inexpensive and readily available testing device called a durometer. With this device, they would measure how much firmness and suppleness each woman’s facial skin had lost and how deep her facial wrinkles were. Bone analyses were then done with x-rays. The connection was pretty clear – women with smoother skin had better bones all over – in the hips, the legs, and the spine. And it didn’t even matter how old those women were. If they had wrinkles, the researchers could be sure that there were bone problems at hand.

Of course, anyone’s got to be curious about why the researchers would even think to make the connection. How did they even think to look at facial skin wrinkles to know about what those women’s bones were like? There’s a reason of course.

Scientists have known for quite some time now that collagen, the popular skin and lip plumper that is used at every cosmetic treatment clinic, is the material that the body uses in the building of bone as well as skin. As people grow older, the amount of collagen their skin has access to falls and their skin becomes less plump and full. Collagen, when its levels in the body fall, doesn’t just make itself unavailable to the skin; it becomes unavailable to the bones as well.

There is further research doctors need to do. They need to test to see if they can develop a scale by which the depth and sharpness of a woman’s facial creases can directly point to how likely she is to fracture a bone should she fall. This could really help doctors bring down the cost of helping elderly women. And many more women than do today, would get help in time.

Tags: low bone density, osteoporosis, bone density