A new corrective model to evaluate TBS in obese post-menopausal women: a cross-sectional study

The relationship between post-menopausal osteoporosis and obesity has been mainly investigated using bone mineral density (BMD) as marker of bone health. Since BMD does not reflect bone microarchitecture, another analytical tool, the Trabecular Bone Score (TBS), has been recently developed for this purpose. In this study, we intended to investigate the validity of TBS as marker of bone quality in obese post-menopausal women.

Three hundred fifty-two post-menopausal women were consecutively enrolled in the study and underwent anthropometric and dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) examination. DXA-based BMD was used to classify subjects into osteoporotic (9%), osteopenic (58%), and controls (33%) categories. As TBS is sometimes sensitive to the effects of increased image noise with higher BMI, a corrected version of the TBS (TBS*) was also used to assess bone microarchitecture quality in this cohort.

As expected, BMI was positively and negatively related to total BMD (r = 0.22, p < 0.0001) and TBS (r = - 0.12, p < 0.05), respectively. TBS* was found positively and significantly correlated with femoral neck BMD (r = 0.40, p < 0.001), total hip (r = 0.33, p < 0.001) and lumbar spine BMD (r = 0.50, p < 0.001).

TBS, once removed the effect of BMI, can serve as a good surrogate maker of bone microarchitecture in obese post-menopausal women in addition to BMD.