Fellas, Are Your Bones Getting Weaker?

According to a study conducted by Columbia University, air pollutants may cause increased bone damage in older women. What was observed was that air pollution can double the reduction in bone mineral density that is naturally seen. In other words, air pollution has been observed to make women's bones age faster and, in some cases, twice as fast as expected.

The study uses data from more than 160,000 postmenopausal women and found that the weakening of bones/reduction in bone minerals was happening significantly faster than that of what is expected naturally via aging. The research team estimated air pollution (NO, NO2, SO2, and PM10) based on the participants' home addresses-not bone samples (for the record, one of the easiest ways to directly examine bone samples from a living person is via taking a tooth, but that may have been too invasive). Instead of sampling the bones directly to see what air pollutants the subjects were exposed to, the subject's bone mineral density was measured at enrollment and at a one year follow up, a three year follow up, and a six year follow up using x-ray absorptiometry.

Do the observations and test population make sense? The short answer is yes, and this is why: there are roughly 2.1 million osteoporosis-related bone fractures recorded annually with 80% of those cases being women. Osteoporosis is a skeletal disease characterized by low bone mass that leads to bone fragility which increases fracture risk. It is the most common reason for broken bones in the elderly population. Unlike in a younger, healthy person, when a bone breaks in someone with osteoporosis when the bone heals the person may have chronic pain and decreased ability to carry out normal activities.

Specifically for women, osteoporosis starts to occur after menopause due to lower levels of estrogen and yes the same thing happens to men with lower levels of testosterone. Given that information, it makes sense that most osteoporosis related bone fractures happen in women and not men, since unless there is an issue, men's bodies don't really have a sharp decrease in hormones like women's bodies do. To be clear, while men's hormones do decrease over time, it's not as dramatic of a drop as women's hormones. Of course, for the previously mentioned values we are assuming biological women and for that to be true in the study as well. There are certain diseases and disorders that appear disproportionately in one biological sex than the other, for example, breast cancer has a higher prevalence in women than in men.

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