Pathogenesis, prevention and therapy of disuse osteoporosis

BACKGROUND: Disuse osteoporosis is common. Due to its special etiology, the prevention and therapy is difficult, and the burden on the social and family is very heavy. OBJECTIVE: To analyze the etiology, pathogenesis and strategy of prevention and therapy of disuse osteoporosis in order to offer a reference for prevention of disuse osteoporosis effectively. METHODS: CNKI database and PubMed database were searched for the relevant papers of disuse osteoporosis published from January 2002 to September 2012 with the key word of "disuse osteoporosis" in Chinese and English, respectively. Totally 178 documents were retrieved. All retrieved articles were checked, and those that were closely relevant with the subject, original and reliable, had clear viewpoint and comprehensive analysis were included. Duplicate documents and experiments without randomized controlled trials were excluded. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: There are 50 articles enrolled in this paper. The etiology of disuse osteoporosis is classified into three kinds: lack of mechanical loading, microgravity status, spinal cord injury and peripheral nerve injury. The prevention and therapy for disuse osteoporosis are shown as follows: (1) drug treatment, including calcitonin, Chinese herbs, diphosphonate, vitamin, calcium, strontium salt and nerve growth factors; (2) physical treatment, including pulse electric-magnetic field, ultrasound, resonance wave, passive movement and electroacupunture treatment. Currently, there is no ideal prevention and treatment strategy for disuse osteoporosis. Scholars have tended to investigate the pathogenesis of disuse osteoporosis from the aspect of genetics recently, and have obtained some progress in signal pathway proteins and special gene loci.