Endocrine Abstracts

Osteoporosis can be caused by many miscellaneous factors. These factors include medical, lifestyle and socioeconomic variables, the latest being not well studied and defined in international bibliography. From these there are the factors regarding the working environment (house or office) and the living environment (urban or countryside). Our hypothesis is based on the fact that women living in an urban environment or working in an office environment should have lower Bone Mineral Density (BMD) and thus, greater fracture possibility because of their lower level of physical activity, greater alcohol/coffee consumption and increased smoking frequency compared to women living in the countryside or women housekeeping.

In order to find whether this hypothesis is true, a population based observational retrospective study has been performed. The fracture rate of 4616 postmenopausal osteoporotic women (PMOW; mean age=64.1±9.3 years) from 160 centers all over Greece has been compared with the two aforementioned possible risk factors. Descriptive statistics like the mean±S.D. and frequencies were used to present the data. In order to assess for relationships between categorical variables the χ² test was performed. Statistical analysis was conducted using the software SAS, version 9.1 and statistical significance was established as 5%.

The results are as follow: (1) 16.2% of these PMOW had a history of fracture and for 80.3% of them was a hip fracture (2) 84.1% of PMOW lived in urban environment and had lower fracture rate than women living in the countryside (P<0.05) and 3) 47.2% of the PMOW worked at home and had lower fracture rate than women working for more than 20 years in an office environment (P<0.0001).

It can be concluded that more fracture-susceptible PMOW are those working in an office environment and also living in the countryside. It can be assumed that the first is related with lower BMD and the second with the more ‘fall-prone’ nature of the country environment.