THE INCIDENCE OF OSTEOPOROSIS IN PATIENTS WITH FEMORAL NECK FRACTURE

which is called old age, is attended with changes which are easily detected in the dead body; and one of the principal of these is found in the bones, for they become thin in their shell, and spongy in their texture. ” At the same time he remarked that, in thirty years of London practice, he had seen only two patients with fracture of the neck of the femur who were under the age of fifty. Thus, well over a century ago, the impression was recorded that this type of fracture was common in the elderly group of patients likely to have that generalised decrease in bone mass which we now call “ osteoporosis. ” Much more recently Stewart (1955), Buhr and Cooke (1959) and Bauer (1960) have shown that with increasing age, especially after the age of fifty, there is a progressive increase in the incidence of fracture of the neck of the femur. Similarly, Cooke (1955) and Barnett and Nordin (1960) have presented evidence that osteoporosis is commonest in the elderly, and Bauer (1960) stated the reasons why this qualitative change in the skeleton is important in fracture of the neck of the femur. Direct as opposed to circumstantial evidence of a connection between osteoporosis and fractures in the elderly has been reported only by Rutishauser and Dufour (1950), who found histological osteoporosis in all of the handful of patients with femoral neck fractures that the