A woman’s reproductive health can be divided into stages, with the passage through menopause being the final one. Each year in the United States, about 1.3 million women make this journey.
While this change puts an end to a woman’s reproductive stage, the other side effects that come with menopause range from minor nuisances like hot flashes to life-altering bone loss. In fact, about 20% of a woman’s bone loss occurs in the years following menopause, leaving women at much greater risk for painful vertebral compression fractures.
October is Menopause Awareness Month, so the team at Glaser Pain Relief Center is using this blog to take a closer look at the connection between vertebral compression fractures and menopause and to explain what we can do if you join the millions of women who have compression fractures in their spines.
A great place to start this discussion is describing the hormone connection to your bones. While estrogen is largely associated with reproduction, this hormone has many other duties, including keeping your bones strong by slowing the natural breakdown in your bone tissues.
When you pass through menopause, your estrogen levels drop precipitously, causing you to lose this valuable hormonal protection. As a result, one in three women around the world has osteoporosis after age 50, which comes out to about 200 million women worldwide.
This bone loss can be very serious and lead to bone fractures, often in the hips and along the spine in the form of painful compression fractures. There are between 1 million and 1.5 million vertebral compression fractures each year in the US, and women far outpace men on this front thanks to menopause.
It’s important to explain what a compression fracture is because it’s not like a bone break in the traditional sense. Most compression fractures develop over time and due to bone loss and the vertebra slowly collapses inward.
Compression fractures typically develop in your mid and upper back and they can lead to:
Some women have no side effects from compression fractures and they’re only diagnosed with imaging. For the women who do develop symptoms, there are pain-relieving options available.
If you develop a compression fracture, or more than one, the team at Glaser Pain Relief Center has an excellent solution called a balloon kyphoplasty.
During this procedure, we insert a balloon into your collapsed vertebra and inflate it to restore height to the bony structure. Once we expand your vertebra with the balloon, we inject a special cement called methyl methacrylate into the newly created cavity. This cement then hardens, which re-establishes the strength and support of your vertebra.
Believe it or not, we can perform a balloon kyphoplasty right here in our office in less than an hour, and you’re free to go home afterward to recover.
If you’re struggling with pain in your upper or mid back and you can’t figure out why, please come see us for an evaluation. If we find that you have compression fractures, we can remedy them quickly, which not only relieves your immediate discomfort, but also helps prevent a cascade of fractures.
For expert diagnosis and care of compression fractures, we invite you to contact Glaser Pain Relief Center in Encino, California, today to schedule an appointment.
