How to Prevent Hip Fractures? The 7 Bone-Building Habits That Could Prevent a Fall | Dr. Vonda Wright

Dr. Vonda Wright (0:00)

30% of women who fracture their femoral neck will not survive for one year. And 50% of those who do survive are too disabled to return to what they did before the fall.

So today, I'm going to teach you the seven ways I keep my patients out of that statistic. Because a hip fracture, this is the bone that breaks right here, is not an accident. It is the end of a cascade that started nearly 20 years earlier. So this is how it happened. She got up in the night to go to the bathroom. Maybe she felt a little dizzy. Maybe she caught her toe on the rug. Maybe her little dog was swirling around her feet, thinking it was time to get up. And she tripped and she fell. And she landed hard on her hip and it fractured. She could feel the pop, the excruciating pain of a bone she never really paid attention to because bones, we think they're silent until they break. If she was lucky enough for somebody to find her or to have one of those buttons that people know she had fallen or reach for her cell phone, she was immediately taken to the hospital. She gets there, she's in the emergency room, she meets somebody like me and we prepare to fix her hip. She's usually in the hospital three days a week. And if she is one of the lucky 50% that returns to pre-fall function, she'll never walk the same again. And for 30% of the people, that is their last hospitalization because she'll die in a year. I am not trying to shock you with these statistics.

These statistics are real and reproducible and well-documented. It's not just about breaking your hip. Breaking your hip can be a life-ending event, but here's the kicker. Here's what you need to know from this diatribe today.

Bone health is preventable. Breaking your hip is often preventable, not the day before it happens, but starting 10 and 20 years before it happens. So today, I'm going to talk to you about how, as your orthopedic surgeon, I would rather never meet you in the ER. I would rather prevent this from happening to you altogether. So listen, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright. I'm your orthopedic sports surgeon and founder and creator of skeletal longevity.

I have been an orthopedic surgeon for 27 years and I have put more ephemeral neck fractures back together than I ever wanted to do. And I can tell you, the women who walk into my clinic doing single-leg balance and jumping every day, they are the ones that I do not see as frequently on the fracture list. I want you to know, you are not falling apart. You are not clumsy. Balance is a skill. Strength is a skill. Bone health is a skill that can be trained at any age. This is what's happening in the body and why the ephemeral neck matters. I always bring my femur when I talk to you about this.

This is a femur. The thigh bone.

This narrow part right here, this is the femoral neck.

This is where most of the fractures happen. This is the fracture that caused 30 percent of all women who break here to perish in the first year. Two things break a hip. First, it's the fall itself that then makes you land on bone that is too weak to survive the fall. If you only train one, you've done half the work.

Seventy percent of all people in nursing homes are women. Falls are one of the major reasons that they are there. We have seven ways, maybe even more, to prevent this from ever happening. First, how do you know what your bones are doing? You got to get a DEXA scan and you cannot wait until you're 65 I know. Insurance only wants to pay for your DEXA scan at 65 But by then, often the damage is done. I order DEXA scans on everybody, the 30-year-old, the 40-year-old, the 50-year-old, anybody who has a risk factor. And if I cannot make a strong enough case with insurance that they need to pay for this critical diagnostic tool, I'm going to ask you to do something unheard of. I'm going to ask you to save your coffee money and pay for it out of pocket. Usually, you can find one for $100.

You need to know what your bone density is. You need to know what your T-score is at 45, not just 65 Because at 45, if we find out that your bone density is suffering, like osteopenia or frank osteoporosis, we can do something about it. So as I've taught you before in other videos, when we discuss how to read your DEXA scan, your T-score compares your bones to those of a healthy 30-year-old. Any positive number is amazing. When your number is to minus 1, that's considered normal. But minus 1 is the diagnosis of osteopenia, where you've lost at least 10% of your bone density. Below minus 2.5 is the definition of osteoporosis. Just a refresher. Reading a DEXA scan is like grading on a bell curve in school. Right up the middle is the average, the healthy 30-year-old. You want to know where you sit on that curve. You want to know before you fall, not after. You gotta get a DEXA scan. Number two, what else can we do to prevent these falls? We need to re-train our balance. Balance starts degrading in our 20s.