People living with HIV (PLWH) have increased risk of osteoporosis and fractures. As PLWH live longer through effective antiretroviral therapy (ART) we see that HIV-related bone loss is superimposed upon age-related bone loss, resulting in up to four-fold higher annual rates of fragility fracture in PLWH than in the general population. One of the major research projects of the Bone Quality Research Lab in the UC San Francisco Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging hopes to apply novel high-resolution image acquisition and analysis to both quantify bone quality deterioration in PLWH relative to uninfected controls and determine the relationship between bone marrow adiposity and bone quality deterioration in PLWH.
Recently, researchers from the lab set out to assess the main determinants of bone strength in the proximal femur of PLWH in the 50–70-year age range. (The…
