With changes in lifestyle and dietary habits, youngsters are increasingly becoming a high risk group, they say.

While women, especially those who are past their menopause, are at a higher risk of getting osteoporosis, experts say that a change in lifestyle is making others vulnerable to the disease too.

Ravi Mohan Bagga, senior orthopedic consultant, said: “Osteoporosis is not an illness of just old ladies, but also affects young individuals in both genders. These days it is a trend seen mainly in the younger population used to a sedentary lifestyle and eating junk food.”

“Men in their 50s do not experience the rapid loss of bone mass that women do in the years following menopause. By the age of 65 or 70, however, men and women lose bone mass at the same rate and the absorption of calcium, an essential nutrient for bone health throughout life, decreases in both sexes,” he added.

Some of the factors that increase the risk of osteoporosis are prolonged hormonal imbalance, excessive use of medicines like steroids, lack of vitamin D, small bone frame, smoking and consumption of alcohol and caffeine.

Also if one has a family history of osteoporosis, the chances of suffering from the disease increase, he said.

Talking about women and osteoporosis, Dinesh Kansal, obstetrician and gynaecologist, said: “As women age, estrogen levels decrease and the risk of osteoporosis increases.”

“Women who take birth control pills during their reproductive years may reduce their risk of osteoporosis developing later in life, probably because of the estrogen that many oral contraceptives contain. Estrogen replacement therapy helps protect women against bone loss,” he said.

According to Kansal, more than 26 million women in India suffer from osteoporosis. There are no government figures on the total number of people in India who suffer from the disease.

“One in three women above the age of 50 and one in five men in the same age group suffer from osteoporotic fractures in India. It is estimated that about 20 percent women and 10-15 percent men would be osteoporotic by the year 2015,” he said.

One of the biggest challenges concerning osteoporosis is under-diagnosis and under-treatment.

“Prevention of all osteoporotic fractures, including spinal fractures, must be a key public health goal. Despite spinal fractures causing severe pain and possible disability people often dismiss it as simple back pain or arthritis. Therefore, they remain undiagnosed and untreated,” Kansal said.

Talking about prevention, Bagga said that regular exercise and adequate calcium intake in the form of dairy products and green, leafy vegetables helps in keeping the disease at bay.

On the basis of their discovery, they have begun development of a drug for prevention and treatment of osteoporosis and other bone disorders.

Osteoporosis is the most widespread degenerative disease in the Western world and is expressed in the loss of bone mass and the weakening of bone structure, contributing to frequent bone fractures, disability and even death.

In their current research, the researchers found that the bone cells produce a series of substances composed of fatty acids and amino acids called “acyl amides.”

They then analyzed their precise chemical composition, created synthetic versions of them, and examined their effect on bone cell cultures.

In experiments on mice, they discovered that one of the compounds in the group of synthetic materials, oleoyl serine, increased bone density in both healthy and osteoporotic mice.

They also found that the osteoporotic mice were actually missing the oleoyl serine in their bones.

According to the researchers the findings can serve as the basis for new drugs that can both prevent bone loss and boost bone formation and in this way reverse loss of bone tissue in osteoporosis patients.

Prof. Mechoulam expressed confidence that their work showing bone mass accumulation would lead soon to the development of an effective osteoporosis drug.

The findings have just been published in the American journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

But vitamin pills seemed to have less of an effect in women with heart disease, Dr. Susanne Rautiainen of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, and her colleagues found.

The results don’t settle the question of whether it’s actually the vitamin pills that are protective, Rautiainen told Reuters Health via e-mail.

“It is very important to keep in mind that multivitamin users tend be ‘healthier’ in general. They usually smoke less, are more physically active and have a healthier diet,” the researcher wrote. “Even if we have controlled for many of those factors that are associated with a healthy behavior we cannot exclude the possibility that we might measure a healthy lifestyle via multivitamin use.”

Approximately half of American adults report taking a multivitamin regularly.

In industrialized countries, Rautiainen and her team note in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, multivitamin use is widespread. While conventional wisdom holds that taking vitamins could help prevent heart disease, the researchers add, there’s actually little evidence to back up this claim.

To investigate the relationship between vitamin use and heart disease in women, Rautiainen and her team followed 31,671 women with no history of heart disease and 2,262 women who did have cardiovascular disease for about 10 years. The women ranged in age from 49 to 83 at the study’s outset, and about 60 percent in each group used some type of dietary supplement.

During the observed period, 932 heart attacks occurred among the women without heart disease, while 269 women with existing heart disease had heart attacks.

Among the women who initially had no heart disease and did not take any dietary supplements, 3.4 percent had heart attacks, compared to 2.6 percent of the women who took multivitamins plus other supplements; this translated to a 27 percent lower heart attack risk with vitamins. Among the women with heart disease, 13 percent of the non-supplement-users had heart attacks, compared to 14 percent of women who took multivitamins only, which wasn’t a statistically significant difference (meaning it could have been due to chance).

For the women without heart disease at the study’s outset, taking a multivitamin for less than five years reduced heart attack risk by 18 percent compared with non-users of supplements. Taking vitamins for 10 or more years cut risk by 41 percent.

Similar studies have been done in men, with some confirming the current findings and others contradicting them, Rautiainen said. She concluded: “The question of whether multivitamins are good for you still remains!”

Vitamin D deficiency, resulting from either lack of sun exposure or poor dietary intake, is increasingly being recognized as a risk factor for a number of serious illnesses, and has been linked with autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. Yet exactly how vitamin D is involved in disease is largely unknown. Researchers suspect that genetics could be contributing to the connection.

Vitamin D exerts its effects on genes through the vitamin D receptor (VDR), which binds to specific locations of the genome to influence gene expression. An international team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Canada have now mapped sites of VDR binding, information they can then use to identify disease-related genes that vitamin D might influence.