Osteoporosis is a severe disease of bones that weakens bones. About 200 million women known to suffer from osteoporosis worldwide. There are several known risk factors that cause long-term fracture risk. However, risk factors that cause risk for a shorter time like over a  1-year period are less known.

For evaluating factors that involved in near-term risk of fractures (such as hip fracture and any non-vertebral fracture), scientists a study. They used a repeated-observations design and data that was taken from the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures (SOF) for their study. A total of 2499 osteoporotic women were involved in the study. The age of the women was ≥65 years. The factors which were used to evaluate the near-term risk of fractures over the 1-year period were evaluated by using multivariable frailty models. These potential predicting factors followed to each qualifying SOF exam before the evaluation. Further, a corresponding risk-prediction tool was also established for evaluation because of hip fracture discriminative ability. 

Percentage of fractures in 1-year period successive to each exam was 6.6%  for a  non-vertebral fracture and 2.2% for hip fracture. The independent factors that were predictors of hip fractures were a prior fracture, low total hip T-score, and risk factors for falls. Further, the independent factors that predicted non-vertebral fracture were age, prior falls, prior fracture,  total hip T-score, Parkinson’s disease or stroke, walking speed, and smoking.

Therefore, various predictive factors of hip and non-vertebral fracture were identified within a 1-year follow-up period among elder osteoporotic patients. Further, a subset for hip fracture was involved in the risk assessment tool. An assessment of these factors can help in evaluating treatment options for osteoporosis by analyzing patients, which required an urgent need of treatment. However, additional research is required to justify the findings of this study the precision of the risk assessment tool.