Safety and efficacy of teriparatide in elderly women with established osteoporosis: bone anabolic therapy from a geriatric perspective

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Teriparatide in the context of osteoporosis and bone density.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as older adults and people over 80, women only.

Postmenopausal women aged 42 to 86 were randomized to placebo (N=544) or teriparatide 20 mug (N=541) by daily self-injection for a median of 19 months.

For this analysis, subgroups were defined according to patient age younger than 75 (N=841) and 75 and older (N=244).

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and multicenter.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Teriparatide group and the comparison group should start out alike.

As a double-blind Teriparatide study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Teriparatide group a baseline to be compared against.

Running at several centres spread the Teriparatide study over different clinics and patient groups.

The FPT was a randomized, multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

The FPT multicenter international study.

The effects of teriparatide on bone mineral density (BMD) of the lumbar spine and femoral neck; the incidence of new vertebral and new nonvertebral fragility fractures; bone turnover markers, including bone-specific alkaline phosphatase; and urinary deoxypyridinoline corrected for creatinine clearance, as well as the safety of teriparatide, were investigated.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Age Factors, Bone Density, Bone Density Conservation Agents, Bone Remodeling, Femur Neck, Fractures, Bone and Hypercalcemia.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Teriparatide in people with osteoporosis and bone density.

Its findings take up roughly 6 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2006 (Journal of the American Geriatrics Society), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Teriparatide compound page, Osteoporosis and bone density research.