A person with Type 2 diabetes is three times more likely to break a bone than a nondiabetic. Since the number of people with diabetes is increasing rapidly in the United States, skeletal fragility in patients with Type 2 diabetes is a growing, but little-known, public health issue.
Usually poor bone density is the culprit behind fragile bones, but that is not the case with Type 2 diabetics, who tend to have normal to high bone density. Yet, they still suffer from fractures at an alarming rate. Nobody knows why.
In my Bone Biomechanics Lab, we try to understand what is going wrong by looking deep inside diabetic bone, at the micro-level. We think we are on our way to identifying one of the biological mechanisms that explains bone fragility in people with diabetes.
