Drug Research
BENEFIT OF ADHERENCE DEPENDS ON AGE AND FRACTURE TYPE – (5-11-09)
Benefit of Adherence With Bisphosphonates Depends on Age and Fracture Type
I’ve always felt that anti-resorptive therapy is the complete wrong way to approach improving bone health. A few things with this study. First, take 10 minutes or so to read through the rather extensive list of conflict of interests!! Next, look at how low the adherence is. Lastly, even with high adherence to medication use, the number of patients that need to be treated to prevent 1 hip fracture is 107.
This number would need to be much, much higher at lower rates of adherence found across the board in the people taking this drug. This is a very high number, suggesting that this class of drugs should not even be used, which is of course contrary to the huge number of scripts written for this class. I’ve always said that if the general public truly understood how useless and dangerous many of these drugs were there would be a paltry market for them.
