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Health News Archive 405 - Bone Mineral Density
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Soy Helps Maintain Healthy Bone Density in Women

As a health concern that faces one in three postmenopausal women, osteoporosis causes 90% of all hip fractures, results in more than 2.5 million physician visits, 432,000 hospitalizations, and 180,000 nursing home admissions each year and costs the US healthcare system more than $15 billion each year.

A new study published online in the European Journal of Nutrition suggests that a therapy for maintenance of bone mineral density (BMD) might be soy.

In a single-blind randomized, placebo-controlled trial, 90 Chinese women aged 45–60 years were given either 84 mg of soy isoflavones, 126 mg isoflavones or placebo for six months. Researchers measured bone mineral density (BMD) of the spine and hip at 0 and 6 months, while measuring urine levels of bone loss at 0, 3, and 6 months.

The researchers found that higher dose of isoflavones had a significant effect on helping slow bone loss compared to placebo and that the bone-specific urine biomarker of bone loss, called Dpd, was significantly decreased in both soy groups compared to placebo. But the significant decrease in bone loss in the higher soy group caused the researchers to suggest that “the optimal intervention dose might be larger than 80–90 mg isoflavones per day for the prevention of bone loss in this population.”

The researchers concluded, “soy isoflavones had a significantly positive dose-dependent effect on [minimizing] bone loss in postmenopausal Chinese women” and “the high-dose of 126 mg isoflavones per day is an effective dose for the prevention of postmenopausal bone loss.”

Source: Soy isoflavones attenuate bone loss in early postmenopausal Chinese women: A single-blind randomized, placebo-controlled trial. Eur Jou Nutr printed online June 8, 2006 DOI: 10.1007/s00394-006-0602-2

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