We evaluated the predictive ability of FRAX® in a cohort of 815 Japanese women. The observed 10-year fracture rate did not differ significantly from that predicted by FRAX®. The predictive ability of FRAX® without femoral neck bone mineral density (BMD) was similar to that with femoral neck BMD.
Introduction: We evaluated the ability of the Japanese version of FRAX®, a World Health Organization fracture risk assessment tool, to predict the 10-year probability of osteoporotic fracture.
Methods: Self-reported major osteoporotic fracture (N = 43) and hip fracture (N = 4) events were ascertained in the 10-year follow-up survey of the Japanese Population-Based Osteoporosis Cohort Study. Participants were 815 women aged 40-74 years at the baseline survey. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis compared FRAX® with multiple logistic models based on age, body weight, and femoral neck BMD.
Results: The number of observed major osteoporotic or hip fracture events did not differ significantly from the number of events predicted by the FRAX® model (with or without BMD). The area under the curve (AUC) value for FRAX® with BMD for predicting major osteoporotic fractures was similar to that of a logistic model with age, body weight, and BMD (0.69 vs. 0.71, respectively; p = 0.198); the AUC of FRAX® with BMD for predicting hip fractures was similar to that of a model based on age and BMD (0.88 vs. 0.89, respectively; p = 0.164). The AUCs of FRAX® without BMD for predicting major osteoporotic and hip fractures were similar to those with BMD (0.69 vs. 0.67, respectively; p = 0.121; 0.88 vs. 0.86, respectively; p = 0.445).
Conclusions: The Japanese version of FRAX® without BMD estimated the 10-year probability of osteoporotic fracture in this population with few clinical risk factors as similar to that of FRAX® with BMD.