Another new risk factor for osteoporosis to take into account: having suffered a fracture earlier in life.

Osteoporosis is a nasty condition that doesn’t get nearly as much attention in the public sphere – among patients and in the media – as it should.

But osteoporosis not only causes a great deal of disability because of fractures – chronic pain, loss of function, immobility, etc – but it can also kill.

Thus, 20% or so of people who break a hip will die as a direct result of that fracture over the next few months following that fracture.

And osteoporosis is not just an “old woman’s” disease, because men suffer about 1/3 of all hip fractures, and lots of younger people (those not yet seniors) already either have full-fledged osteoporosis or the beginnings of it.

So it’s important to recognize osteoporosis risk factors earlier in life, and to do something about them to lower your chances of ending up with a fracture (or several).

And to that end, we know that smoking, a poor diet, the use of certain drugs, being thin, not doing enough exercise, drinking too much alcohol, a lack of vitamin D, and a diet poor in calcium are all key risk factors for future fractures.

But to that long list you can now add, according to a recent study in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, having suffered a fracture at an earlier age, that is, according to data from the huge multi-national Global Longitudinal Study of Osteoporosis in Women (GLOW), older women who had fractures when they were young women also had a significantly higher risk of bone fractures later in life, perhaps because those women have some sort of built-in weakness in their bones to begin with.

So, if that’s you, if you’re someone who had a fracture earlier in life, you should be especially careful, I think, to watch your other risk factors for this potentially devastating condition.