Dental X-rays expose signs of osteoporosis

Dental X-rays could be used for more than checking on your teeth, as the scans could also help determine if a woman is at risk for osteoporosis, researchers say.

Cost and a lack of specialized equipment and staff are a roadblock to wide-scale screening, the Dutch team said.

At a meeting of the International Association for Dental Research in New Orleans on Thursday, Prof. Paul van der Stelt of the Academic Center for Dentistry Amsterdam and his team announced they have developed a software-based approach to detect signs of osteoporosis using routine dental X-rays.

Automatically analyzinginformation from dental X-rays to detect patients at risk for osteoporosis would involve no extra time, radiation and almost no morecost, the researchers said.

Osteoporosis, which leads to the loss of bone mass and increases the risk of fractures, affects one in four women over the age of 50 and one in eight men of the same age group, according to Osteoporosis Canada.

Diagnostic tool

The approach uses software to analyze specific traits in bone patterns, such as thickness, amount of fragmentation and the main orientation of trabecular bone a spongy mesh at the end of bones that becomes thinner and more porous with age.

To test the technique, researchers compared measurements of bone thickness at the femur, hip and spine using the gold standard approach of bone mass density, andtheir new technique.

Looking at 671 women with an average age of 55, the researchers said they were able to predict osteoporosis conditions to the same extent as the bone density measurements.

"We concluded that measurement of mandibular cortical width using active shape modeling is capable of diagnosing skeletal osteoporosis with good diagnostic ability and repeatability," the team wrote in the April issue of the journal Bone.

People who are identified as being at risk could then be sent for more thorough exams.