Abaloparatide effect on forearm bone mineral density and wrist fracture risk in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Abaloparatide in the context of osteoporosis and bone density, published as a randomized controlled trial.

This exploratory analysis of the phase 3 ACTIVE study evaluated effects of abaloparatide versus placebo and teriparatide on forearm bone mineral density (BMD) and risk of wrist fracture.

Who Took Part

The study group was 982 women.

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, women only.

Forearm BMD was measured by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry in a subset of 982 women from ACTIVE, evenly distributed across the three treatment groups.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

Neither the women nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Abaloparatide, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

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

Wrist fractures were ascertained in the total cohort (N = 2463).

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Absorptiometry, Photon, Bone Density, Bone Density Conservation Agents, Kaplan-Meier Estimate, Osteoporosis, Postmenopausal, Osteoporotic Fractures and Parathyroid Hormone-Related Protein.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Abaloparatide, Bone mineral density, Teriparatide and Wrist fracture.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Abaloparatide in 982 women in people with osteoporosis and bone density.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

Results are reported in around 5 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2019 (Osteoporosis international : a journal established as result of cooperation between the European Foundation for Osteoporosis and the National Osteoporosis Foundation of the USA), a journal based in England.

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