ESCEO-AMGEN FELLOWSHIP AWARDS
At the end of the second plenary session of the first day of the Seventh ECCEO meeting, the European Society for Clinical and Economical Aspect of Osteoarthritis and Osteoporosis (ESCEO) had the pleasure to present the recipients of the Amgen Young investigator Award 2008. These grants were generously supported by Amgen towards the two highest scored abstract of the ECCEO8 meeting.
The first recipient was Stéphanie Boutroy, from Lyon, France, for her work on the assessment of the association of both cortical and trabecular architecture impairement at the distal radius and tibia with vertebral fracture severity in postmenopausal women. She assessed bone architecture and volumetric density with HR-pQCT (XTreme CT, Scanco Medical AG, Bassersdorf, Switzerland) in 100 women with vertebral fracture (mean age 74 ± 9 years) of different grades according to the method of Genant and in 362 women (mean age 69 ± 7 years) without peripheral or vertebral fracture from the OFELY study. She showed that at the distal radius, after adjustment for age and spine aBMD assessed by DXA, there were significant trends in decreasing volumetric bone densities, cortical thickness, trabecular number, thickness, and increasing both trabecular separation and distribution of separation with greater vertebral fracture severity (p<0.04). She concluded that in postmenopausal women, vertebral fractures are associated with low volumetric bone density and architectural alterations of trabecular and cortical bone at the radius and tibia, independently of spine aBMD.
The second Amgen Young Investigator Award was given to John Brent Richards. Dr Richards is a post-doctoral research fellow in Genetic Epidemiology at the Twin Research Unit, St. Thomas’ Hospital, King’s College London, UK. The objective of his study was to examine the effect of daily selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) use on the risk of incident clinical fragility fracture. Indeed, depression and osteoporotic fractures are common ailments among elderly persons. SSRI are frequently used in the treatment of depression in this population. The methodology was a population- based, randomly selected, prospective cohort study of 5008 community-dwelling adults 50 years and older, followed over 5 years for incident fractures. Daily SSRI use was reported by 137 subjects. After adjustment for many potential covariates, daily SSRI use was associated with substantially increased risk of incident clinical fragility fracture. Dr Richards concluded that daily SSRI use in adults 50 years and older remained associated with a 2-fold increased risk of clinical fragility fracture after adjustment for potential covariates.
Due to the outstanding quality of these researches, the Scientific Committee of the ECCEO meeting has decided to accept them as oral presentations during the plenary sessions.