Bone mineral density in premenopausal and postmenopausal women

Objective: to evaluate bone mineral density (bmd) in premenopausal and postmenopausal women and to find out osteopenia and osteoporosis in these women. study design: cross-sectional study place and duration of dtudy: department of physiology services institute of medical sciences lahore from september,2009 to april,2010. subjects and methods: bone mineral density of 34 premenopausal and 33 postmenopausal women was determined by the dxl calscan heel densitometer. height and weight of each subject was taken to find out body mass index (bmi). student 't' test was applied to see the significance of difference between the two groups. pearsons correlation coefficient was determined to find out correlation. results: bone mineral density (t-score) was highly significantly less (p= 0.000) in postmenopausal women than in premenopausal women. osteopenia was present in 70.59% of premenopausal women and 63.64% of the postmenopausal women while 30.30% of postmenopausal women had osteoporosis. in postmenopausal women,there was a significant (p= 0.0016) negative correlation between age and bone mineral density. conclusion: postmenopausal women had highly significantly decreased bone mineral density and this density decreased with increasing age. more than two third of both premenopausal and postmenopausal women had osteopenia while 30% of postmenopausal women were osteoporotic.