By SHERRY JACOBSON
Knight Ridder Newspapers

DALLAS — Tanned, trim and smiling, Marty Baze looked the picture of health as she awaited her first bone density scan for osteoporosis at the Aston Ambulatory Care Center in Dallas.

When it comes to osteoporosis, the retired university teacher, who is “just over 60,” knows that looking good on the outside doesn’t count.

“I’m Caucasian, northern European and not overweight,” she says of the factors that studies have suggested would place her at higher risk of developing the bone-thinning disease.

“Even though I exercise a lot and take calcium supplements and estrogen, I probably should have had this test done earlier,” she says.

In fact, medical experts are debating how quickly after menopause women should be tested for osteoporosis. While many doctors are sending their postmenopausal patients for screening tests as early as age 50, other doctors do not even test women after they suffer hip fractures, a classic sign of the disease.

“Historically, these tests have not been very accurate,” says Dr. Richard E. Berger, an endocrinologist who runs the Osteoporosis Care Center in North Dallas. “But medically acceptable bone density tests have been available since the mid-’90s, and the awareness of osteoporosis still is lacking.”

An estimated 10 million Americans have osteoporosis, 80 percent of them women, and 34 million are believed to have low bone mass, which places them at greater risk of developing the disease, says the National Institutes of Health.

Last month, a national panel of medical experts recommended that most women be screened for osteoporosis starting at age 65. However, certain postmenopausal women — those ages 60 to 64 who do not take estrogen and who weigh less than 155 pounds — should also be tested for the disease, notes the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which published its recommendations in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The task force also suggests a two-year interval between screening tests for those women showing signs of rapid bone thinning, which could lead to fractures. But some doctors currently test such women annually. A woman showing little or no signs of bone loss could wait as long as five years between screening tests, suggests a study that accompanied the task force report.

“We’re directing our recommendations to patients seen in typical primary-care settings who have no complaints related to osteoporosis,” says Dr. Alfred O. Berg, chairman of the task force and professor and chair of family medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. “It’s not uncommon that specialists, who tend to see more complicated patients, would want to screen them” at an earlier age and more often.