FRAX 10-Year Hip Fracture Risk

FRAX is a calculator developed at the University of Sheffield for the World Health Organization. It takes your age, sex, height and weight, the bone density at your femoral neck, and a short list of yes-or-no risk factors (a fracture as an adult, a parent's hip fracture, smoking, three or more drinks a day, a corticosteroid, rheumatoid arthritis, another cause of bone loss) and gives the probability that you break a hip in the next 10 years. A bone density scan usually prints the result beneath the scores, often as a censored figure such as under 0.1 percent when the risk is very low; Instalab stores it as printed, since the model's coefficients are not published and it cannot be rerun from the scan alone.

A hip fracture is the one that costs the most independence, which is why its line is lower. In the United States the Bone Health and Osteoporosis Foundation sets it at 3 percent: at or above it, with low bone mass on the scan, medication is advised; below it, the work is finding any cause of bone loss and building bone. The number is only as good as its inputs, so it is checked against your history before it decides anything, and it is not used before 40, or before menopause, where FRAX was not built to apply.