Efficacy of teriparatide in increasing bone mineral density in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis--an Indian experience

What Was Tested

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

Osteoporosis is emerging as a leading cause of substantial morbidity in India, particularly in postmenopausal women.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 82 women taking part.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were middle-aged adults and older adults, women only.

A randomised, prospective, multicentre, open-label, controlled study was conducted on 82 postmenopausal women with established osteoporosis.

Patients were randomly divided into control and teriparatide groups, each group consisting of 41 patients.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind, open-label and multicenter study.

Because people in this Teriparatide study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Blinding on both sides kept the women and researchers unaware of who received Teriparatide.

Nothing was hidden in this open-label Teriparatide study: the women and staff both knew the treatment.

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

Lumbar spine, femoral neck and total hip BMD, bone mineral content (BMC) and bone area were measured by dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) at baseline and at the end of 6 months of treatment.

Bone biomarkers, such as serum bone specific alkaline phosphatase (BSAP) and serum osteocalcin (OC), representing bone formation, and urinary deoxypyridinoline (DPD), representing bone resorption were assessed at baseline, and at 3 and 6 months of treatment.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Bone Density, Bone Density Conservation Agents, Bone Resorption, Calcium, Osteogenesis, Osteoporosis, Postmenopausal and Teriparatide.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and open-label study of Teriparatide in 82 women in people with osteoporosis and bone density.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 8 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2008 (The Journal of the Association of Physicians of India), a journal based in India.

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