Social Impact of Osteoporotic Fractures: Early Diagnosis and Possible Therapies

Costs Of Osteoporotic Fractures

WHO considers osteoporosis to be second only to cardiovascular diseases as a critical health problem (Kanis et al., 1997). The disability due to osteoporosis is comparable or greater than that caused by cancers and by a variety of chronic non-communicable diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, asthma and high blood pressure-related heart disease (Johnell and Kanis, 2006).

Osteoporotic fractures are a major contributor to medical care costs in many countries of the world (Table 1). The total annual costs of osteoporosis exceed, for instance, those for various brain disorders (Ettinger et al., 1992). In the United States, the medical cost of osteoporosis and related fractures is estimated at 20 billion of dollars per year (Cummings and Melton, 2002) and the prediction in dependence of annual rise in age-adjusted incidence of osteoporotic fractures is estimated at 50 billion of dollars in 2050. China spent around 1.5 billion of dollars treating hip fracture in 2006. It is estimated that this will rise to 12.5 billion of dollars in 2020 and to more than 26 billion of dollars by 2050 (Luo and Xu, 2005).