[Role of physician on the treatment of osteoporosis]

Physicians play an important role on the chronic management of the elderly patients. Those patients usually have multiple disorders and these situations lead to us to determine the priority of the treatments because of socio-economical reason or tolerability of the patient against multiple drugs usage. Among the many involutional diseases, osteoporosis is considered to have less priority than the other diseases such as atherosclerosis, by physicians. However, fractures, most serious complication of osteoporosis, result in deteriorated ADL or QOL in osteoporotic patients. Therefore, when the elderly patients with osteoporosis are expected to have longevity or to have higher risks for future fracture, we should give a higher priority for the treatment of fracture prevention. Recent progress in the prevention of fractures allows us to treat osteoporosis with higher priority since the recently launched drug for osteoporosis such as bisphosphonates showed potent ability to reduce incident fractures.