Side effects explained: Why common drugs can lead to broken bones

New research helps to explain why some commonly used drugs come with a serious downside: They up your odds of breaking a bone. The drugs in question, glucocorticoids (eg, cortisone and prednisone) and the insulin sensitizer rosiglitazone work through entirely different mechanisms as therapies for inflammatory diseases and diabetes respectively, and two studies in the June issue of Cell Metabolism now show that they lead to bone loss in different ways too.

Both research teams, one at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, USA, and the other at the Fritz-Lipmann Institute in Germany, say that this new molecular understanding of what happens to bone could lead to the design of drugs with fewer side effects. They also provide new insight into the basic biology of bone.

"People taking a high dose of glucocorticoids can be pretty sick with rheumatoid arthritis or severe asthma, for example, and in that case their systemic fracture risk doubles," said Jan Tuckermann of the Fritz-Lipmann Institute. "For a young person, that might be OK because their risk is very low to start, but, as you become older, it's a real problem," he noted.