(Ivanhoe Newswire) – A new clinical model could make it easier to predict the five-year risk of postmenopausal women fracturing a hip.

Researchers from the University of California at Davis School of Medicine, Sacramento, created the model which includes 11 factors. To come up with the factors they looked at data from 93,676 women who took part in the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI). The model was tested in a subset of 10,750 women who had dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry scans (DXA – an imaging technique) to assess bone mass density which is used to predict the risk of hip fracture.

The study identified eleven factors that predicted hip fracture within five years – age, self-reported health, weight, height, race/ethnicity, self-reported physical activity, history of fracture after age 54, parental hip fracture, current smoking, current corticosteroid use, and treated diabetes. These factors were put into a clinical algorithm to predict the five year risk of hip fractures in postmenopausal women of different ethnicities.

“Knowing the five-year risk of fracture will permit patients and physicians to make informed choices when balancing making lifestyle changes against undergoing medical interventions. Publication of these results, along with the user-friendly tool for their application, will permit others to rapidly test their utility. However, we believe 11 readily available clinical variables offer a simple means of stratifying the 5-year risk of hip fracture in postmenopausal women,” the researchers conclude.

Further studies are needed to define the implications of the algorithm and to confirm the benefits of treatments of those identified as high risk for hip fracture.

This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, which offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. SOURCE: JAMA, 2007;298:2389-2398