Because the diagnosis of osteoporosis is made only after a pathologic fracture has occurred, it is best to take serial bone density (also known as bone mineral density or BMD) measurement scans for high risk individuals (elderly). The World Health Organization (WHO) has established a diagnostic criteria for osteoporosis using BMD T-scores which describes an individual's BMD in terms of the number of SDs by which is differs from the mean peak value in young, healthy persons of the same sex—currently more than 2.5 SDs below the mean as the criterion for osteoporosis. For osteopenia (low bone mass) the range is 1.0 SD to less than 2.5 SDs below the mean. However, T-scores were initially used as an estimation of the prevalence of osteoporosis across populations not to assess osteoporosis prevalence in specific individuals which lead to the National Osteoporosis Foundation and the International Society for Clinical Densitometry to consider using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) of the hip and/or spine as the preferred measurement diagnosis of osteoporosis.
Senile osteoporosis
Osteoporosis circumscripta
Juvenile osteoporosis
Metabolic bone disease
Osteopetrosis
Osteosclerosis
Renal osteodystrophy
Pregnancy and lactation-associated osteoporosis