COMPARISON OF BONE DENSITOMETRY OF THE PHALANGES, DISTAL FOREARM AND AXIAL SKELETON IN EARLY POSTMENOPAUSAL WOMEN PARTICIPATING IN THE EPICSTUDY

We present baseline bone densitometry from the Early Postmenopausal In terventional Cohort study (EPIC, sponsored by Merck, Sharp & Dohme) fo r the first time, in which 1609 women from England, Oregon, Hawaii and Denmark are participating to investigate the efficacy of daily oral a lendronate to prevent early postmenopausal bone lass. We compared radi ographic absorptiometry (RA) of the phalanges for bone mineral density (BMD) measurement with single-energy X-ray absorptiometry (SXA) of th e distal forearm, and dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DSA) of the lu mbar spine, proximal femur and distal forearm, In a random subgroup of 308 women, aged 45-60 years, on average 6 years since menopause (YSM) , bone densitometry was measured once at baseline by Rbi of the phalan ges besides the mandatory measurements by DXA. Bone densitometry was f urthermore measured by SSA al the Danish site (89 women). Sixty-eight of the women had duplicate measurements performed within 1-3 weeks to evaluate the short-term precision error (CV%). One. hundred and one he althy premenopausal women, aged 25-48 years, were recruited at the Dan ish and Hawaiian sites to establish a reference group, The precision e rror was 1.5% for RA of the phalanges and in the range 1.0-2.2% for SX A and DXA, BMD by RA correlated with BMD measured by SXA and DXA in th e range 0.45<r<0.72 (p<0.001). In conclusion, bone densitometry by RA of the phalanges is highly correlated with bone densitometry by SXA an d DXA, RA of the phalanges has a short-term precision error comparable to that of SXA and DXA.