More Info for Citizens.
For general information on Osteoporosis, please consult the International Osteoporosis Foundation Patients&Public pages.According to the current state of the art approach the best way to estimate your personal risk of experiencing an Osteoporotic fracture is to assess your condition with respect to reference populations.
The International Osteoporosis Foundation proposes a questionnaire that helps you assess your level of risk.
The World Health Organisation has recently presented risk assessment tool called FRAX. FRAX estimates your risk of fracture based on clinical risk factors and on the bone mineral density that can be measured with the appropriate technology.
The VPHOP project will take a different approach: we shall develop personalised computer models that simulate the daily loading of the skeleton during normal and abnormal activities, and we shall use them to make a deterministic prediction of the actual risk of fracture in each patient.
The VPHOP project will not replace the current tools based on general population risk. Our goal is to develop an innovative technology that, once a patient has been recognised to be at risk using the current methods, will make it possible to increase the accuracy of the prediction, and provide to the clinical specialist more detailed information on the regions of the skeleton that are at particularly high risk.
This will help the clinicians to better personalise treatments and recommendations. It will also facilitate the improved assessment drug performances, and will make possible preventive, international treatments for those patients that are facing an extremely high risk of fracture and for whom the drug treatment is predicted to be insufficient.
Although some intermediate results might be made available to selected clinical centres in the next few years, the principal results of the VPHOP project will be made available only at the end of the project, which is planned for 2012. After that some years of clinical experimentation will be necessary before the VPHOP technologies can be adopted in the general clinical practice.
Why should we spend tax payer money on a research project that will yield results only so far ahead in time? Because osteoporotic fracture will become a dramatic problem for Europe in the foreseeable future. Already today, nearly four million osteoporotic bone fractures cost the European health system more than 30 billion Euro per year. Because of the ageing population and of the epidemiological trends, it is predicted that this figure will double by 2050.
If VPHOP can deliver a technology that helps to significantly reduce the number of fractures by 2015, it is clearly worth the investment!