Ultrasound Fragility Score: An innovative approach for the assessment of bone fragility

Aim of this paper was to assess the clinical effectiveness of a novel ultrasound (US) approach for the estimation of bone fragility. A total of 85 female patients (40-80 years) were recruited and underwent conventional DXA investigations of both lumbar spine and proximal femur, an abdominal US scan of the lumbar spine and the FRAX® questionnaire for the calculation of osteoporotic fracture probabilities. Acquired US data were analyzed through an automatic algorithm that calculated the Fragility Score (F.S.), a parameter that estimates skeletal fragility from dedicated spectral and statistical analyses. F.S. showed a good correlation with the most reliable fracture risk predictions obtained by FRAX® (r = 0.71, p < 0.001). Since this correlation level with FRAX® outcomes was much better than lumbar BMD one (|r| = 0.43) and very similar to that obtained for femoral neck BMD (|r| = 0.72), F.S. has the potential to become a simple and non-ionizing method for bone fragility assessment.