FRAX 10-Year Major Osteoporotic 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 major bone in the next 10 years. A bone density scan usually prints the result beneath the scores; Instalab stores it from the report, since the model's coefficients are not published and it cannot be rerun from the scan alone.

In the United States the Bone Health and Osteoporosis Foundation sets the treatment line at 20 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. A fracture, a parent's hip fracture, smoking or a steroid the center did not ask about raises it, so the figure 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.