Review Article

Seasonal Variation of Osteoporotic Vertebral Fractures

Konstantinos Lathyris¹, Christos Zafeiris²

1. Postgraduate Program “Metabolic Bones Diseases”, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Medical School, Athens, Greece
2. Laboratory for Research of the Musculoskeletal System “Th. Garofalidis”, Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, General Hospital of Athens KAT, Greece

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Keywords: Fragility fractures, Osteoporosis, Seasonal variation, Vertebral fractures

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Abstract

Fragility fracture is a clinical feature of osteoporosis and mainly occurs in the elderly. The most common sites of low trauma fractures are spine, hip, wrist, humerus and pelvis. Vertebral fractures are considered to be the most common ones and are related to acute and chronic pain, impairing the quality of patient’s life. Seasonal variation of osteoporotic fractures is a subject of interest in multiple articles. Hip fractures seem to be more frequent in winter and this is closely related to variation in the level of serum vitamin-D as well as sarcopenia. On the other hand, there are less articles and surveys regarding vertebral fractures and their seasonal variation. The main cause is the difficulty in diagnosis, considering that a big amount of vertebral fractures are underdiagnosed. The majority of the articles referring to the seasonal variation of vertebral fractures indicate no significant quantitative difference throughout the months of the year. Further investigation should be conducted in the future and a precise timeline of patients’ symptoms would be of vital importance in such cases.

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