Pressure-induced pain on the tibia: an indicator of low bone mineral density?

Previous literature investigating bone pain in osteoporosis has prominently focused on painful conditions following osteoporotic fractures. Is osteoporosis really a silent disease without bone pain and tenderness unless a fracture occurs? Our aim in this study was to answer the question by assessing the questionable tenderness on tibia bones of fracture-free patients with low bone density and to compare the findings with a normal population. One-hundred-thirty-three consecutive postmenopausal female patients with the mean age of 56 years admitted to our clinic for bone mass measurement were included in the study. Bone mineral density (BMD) values of lumbar spine (L2-L4) and right proximal femur (neck, trochanter, Ward's triangle) were measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). Patients with T scores lower than -1 formed the osteopenic-osteoporotic group of patients (low BMD group) whereas those with T scores higher than -1 constituted the normal BMD group according to the osteoporosis definition regarding T score for DXA. Mechanical pressure was applied by a hand algometer on the middle points of three equally divided sections on the anterior part of tibia, and the pressure levels starting the pain sensation (POPL) were recorded. Although the patients in the normal BMD group reported consistently high POPL at all regions of tibia for all BMD measurement sites, this difference reached to a statistical significance level only for the femur neck region. Only mean POPL for the whole tibia had independent association with only femur neck BMD by multiple linear regression analysis. These results are encouraging for assessing the significance of pressure-induced tibial pain as an indicator of low BMD in the future.