(National Tumor Biology Laboratory, NLP-17) Funder: The Hungarian National Laboratories
Excellence program
Subjects:
Clinical medicine
Background and Objectives: Osteoporosis is a major risk of fractures, harming patients’
quality of life. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), which can detect osteoporosis
early, is too expensive to be conducted on a regular basis. Therefore, we aimed to
evaluate a screening method using chest radiographs developed in Japan applied to
another population. Materials and Methods: Fifty-five patients who had a chest radiograph
and DXA and applied within three months of each test were recruited from the patient
database of Semmelweis University (Budapest, Hungary). Graphical analysis of the chest
radiographs was conducted to identify the ratio of the cortical bone in the clavicle
of each patient. Two researchers performed the analysis, and multiple regression was
conducted to determine the bone mineral density of each patient provided by DXA. Results:
The Pearson correlation between two examiners’ determinations of the cortical bone
ratio was 0.769 (p < 0.001). The multiple regression model proved to be statistically
significant in identifying osteoporosis, but the model adopted for the Hungarian population
was different compared to the Japanese population. Conclusions: This simple, economic
Japanese graphical analysis method for chest radiographs may be feasible in detecting
osteoporosis. Further studies with a larger population of patients with greater variety
of ethnicity would be of value in improving the accuracy of this model.
