Geographic Variation in Osteoporotic Hip Fracture Incidence The Growing Importance of Asian Influences in Coming Decades.pdfVIP

SAGE-Hindawi Access to Research Journal of Osteoporosis Volume 2010, Article ID 757102, 5 pages doi:10.4061/2010/757102 Review Article Geographic Variation in Osteoporotic Hip Fracture Incidence: The Growing Importance of Asian Influences in Coming Decades D. K. Dhanwal,1 C. Cooper,1, 2 and E. M. Dennison1 1 MRC Epidemiology Resource Centre, Southampton General Hospital, University of Southampton, Southampton SO16 6YD, UK 2 Botnar Research Centre, Institute of Musculoskeletal Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LD, UK Correspondence should be addressed to E. M. Dennison, emd@mrc.soton.ac.uk Received 9 February 2010; Revised 8 June 2010; Accepted 29 June 2010 Academic Editor: Saeko Fujiwara Copyright © 2010 D. K. Dhanwal et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Studies over the last few decades have demonstrated geographic variation in the incidence of hip fracture across continents and among different parts of the same region. This paper studies the epidemiology of hip fracture worldwide, with special emphasis on the geographic variation among Asian countries. Using the Pubmed database, keywords that were employed included hip fracture, incidence rate, geographic variation, osteoporosis, and epidemiology. Articles were chosen based on the basis of (1) focus: studies that were said to specifically focus on geographic variation in hip fracture from different continents with a focus on Asia; (2) language: studies that were in English; (3) methods: studies that used statistical tests to examine hip fracture incidence rates. The highest hip fracture rates are seen in Scandinavian countries and the US and t