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Hi @michaellavacot , it is very nice to hear that your dexa scan mistakes were caught and that you had nice improvements after evenity after all, with pre-existing hypercalciuria! If you don't mind, could you share your bmd% improvements from evenity therapy?
There was a thread on this forum discussing whether supplemental calcium should be stopped temporarily before 24hr urine calcium test. Do you get calcium from food source or supplements? If from supplements, do you see an impact of the amount of calcium from supplements on urine calcium test results? Thank you
Replies to "Hi @michaellavacot , it is very nice to hear that your dexa scan mistakes were caught..."
Hi @mayblin - To answer the second part of your question, I have tested both ways. I generally test while taking my regular regimen of calcium for the day, which might not be the right thing to do. But now that I'm on Prolia, I don't believe that stopping calcium is going to be accurate either because calcium is not going to be readily released from my bones. I waver on this a lot. It does effect urine calcium but not to a great extent I believe.
I take up to 1000 mg of calcium per day as supplements. 200mg with my breakfast cereal with whole milk, and then another 800 throughout the day depending on my diet. If I have cheese at lunch, I skip 400mg. Likewise for dinner. It took me some time to get into a consistent routine, but I welcomed the challenge. I'm the guy that numbers his water bottles to make sure he get at least 2 liters of water per day 🙂
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Hi @mayblin - Yeah, I have been pretty happy after figuring out they used L2-L5 instead of L1-L4. So I don't have an initial L1 BMD, but looking at the other scores, it looks like I have gained about 15% in the spine, 9% in the femoral neck, and 5% in the total hip. Attached is my spreadsheet for tracking improvements in BMD. One other note, I also was given DXA scores compared to an average male, which might make sense on the surface, but all of the fracture models are based on women, so for fracture risk and T-Score, men are supposed to use the women's scale. You'll see that called out on my spreadsheet.
One more thing I'm finding. Since the vertebrae are irregular in shape, the numbers bounce around a bit. For that reason, it is probably best to just look at the average L1-L4 number. You can see that after about 10 months on Prolia, I had two vertebrae with no gain and two gaining 8%. I know that is not reality so the average is probably the best number to look at.
So yeah, feeling pretty good right now and so far so good. I make sure to take in about 1500mg of calcium per day because I still have hypercalciuria to the tune of about 350mg.