[Very old patients with osteoporosis should be treated with alendronate]

Although alendronate treatment for the prevention of osteoporotic fracture has been considered to be first line treatment, there is little knowledge whether very old osteoporosis should be treated with alendronate or not. To elucidate this question, we investigated the effectiveness of osteoporotic drugs in terms of effects of treatment on bone mineral density (BMD), bone resorption markers and fracture prevention in osteoporosis aged over 75 years old or less. A total of 1,041 postmenopausal osteoporosis cases were classified into 4 categories, Young controls (n = 165) and Old controls (n = 95) (Control group), Young (n = 309) and Old osteoporosis (n = 110) treated with alendronate (ALN group), and Young (n = 238) and Old osteoporosis (n = 124) treated with vitamins D3 or K2 (VDK group). We followed their lumbar BMD, urinary excretion of NTX and incident vertebral fracture rate for three years. The effects of the ALN treatment on lumbar BMD and on urinary NTX were not different between the two age-categorized osteoporosis groups, namely, the lumbar BMD increased by around 6-7% after ALN treatment in both Old and Young groups. The urinary excretion of NTX was decreased by 50% from baseline in both Old and Young ALN treated groups. Those effects of ALN were significantly superior to those in the controls and VDK-treated groups of both age categories. Therefore, ALN biological effects on bone were not age-dependent and the effects of ALN were strongest than the other treatments. The effects on fracture prevention in the Old ALN-treated group showed a 66.7% risk reduction rate (RRR) (p< 0.05) when the fracture incidence rate in the control group (50%) was taken as 100%, while it was 18.8% RRR (ns) in VDK-treated Old group. The Young group treated with ALN showed a 35.6% RRR from the Young control group (25% as 100%) (p<0.05). The VDK treated group did not show a significant RRR of incident fracture (24.4%). Thus, alendronate was the only effective modality to prevent fractures in both young and old osteoporosis. These results clearly indicated that very old osteoporotics should be treated with alendronate at this moment.