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Limfa Therapy?

Osteoporosis & Bone Health | Last Active: Mar 30 10:29am | Replies (12)

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@awfultruth

@windyshores I've always wondered about percentage of change in bone density. I've never seen it explained anywhere. So I spent hours today trying to figure it out. The short answer is that the percentage of change calculated using BMD is not the same percentage as using if you used T scores.

On my DXA scan reports the percentage of change is reported based using BMD. I suspect that is what the usual figure is derived from in our discussions etc. If you do the calculation based on T-scores you get very different looking numbers just as you wondered about in your comment. If somehow you were given or calculated your own percentage of change using your T-score it could confuse everything.

Here's the formula for calculating the percentage of change which I got from bonup on inspire.com:
((New-Old)/Old)*100= percentage of change
I tried it and it works and matches the results I got from my DXA reports.
It works while using either BMD or the t-score but the numbers only make sense if you are talking about only one or the other. And since the BMD percentage of change is what is normally used a percentage of change from T-scores is just crazy making (the percentages look huge).
I think it makes sense that the numbers are not comparable but that's harder to think about and explain than just saying they are not comparable so I'll stop with that.

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Replies to "@windyshores I've always wondered about percentage of change in bone density. I've never seen it explained..."

@awfultruth and @windyshores- thank you. This conundrum has been bugging me for a long time. So happy you did a deep dive @awfultruth, I will put my values in of my past DEXA’s to see if this works and finally makes sense to me. Even if the numbers are weird maybe it’ll make me feel a bit more understanding of this idea.