Source URL: http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation/story/378262.html

Rickets on the rise in children
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON | Too little milk, sunshine and exercise: It’s an anti-bone trifecta.

And for some kids, it’s leading to rickets, the soft-bone scourge of the 19th century.

But cases of full-blown rickets are just the red flag: Bone specialists say possibly millions of seemingly healthy children aren’t building as much strong bone as they should — a gap that may leave them more vulnerable to bone-cracking osteoporosis later in life than their grandparents are.

“This potentially is a time bomb,” said Laura Tosi, bone health chief at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington.

Now scientists are taking the first steps to track youngsters’ bone quality and learn just how big a problem the anti-bone trio is causing, thanks to new research that finally shows just what “normal” bone density is for children of different ages.

Physician Heidi Kalkwarf of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital led a national study that gave bone scans to 1,500 healthy children ages 6 to 17 to see how bone mass is accumulated. The result, published last summer: The first bone-growth guide, just like height-and-weight charts, for pediatricians treating children at high risk of bone problems.

Next, the government-funded study is tracking those 1,500 children for seven more years to see how their bones turn out. Say a 7-year-old is in the 50th percentile for bone growth. Does she tend to stay at that level by age 14, or catch up to kids with denser bones?

Almost half of peak bone mass develops during adolescence, and the concern is that missing out on the strongest possible bones in childhood could haunt people decades later. By the 30s, bone is broken down faster than it’s rebuilt. Then it’s a race to maintain bone and avoid the thin bones of osteoporosis in old age.

There’s evidence that U.S. children break their arms more often today than four decades ago — girls 56 percent more, and boys 32 percent more, according to a Mayo Clinic study.

Kalkwarf’s hospital recently found that kids who break arms have lower bone density than their playmates who don’t. That suggests the fracture rise isn’t caused solely to newer forms of risky play, such as inline skates.

Doctors have long known that less than a quarter of adolescents get enough calcium. But strong bones require more than calcium alone. Exercise is at least as important.

Yet childhood exercise is dropping as obesity rises.

Likewise, the body can’t absorb calcium and harden bones without vitamin D. By some estimates, 30 percent of teens get too little.

It’s not just that they don’t drink fortified milk. Bodies make vitamin D with sunlight. With teen computer use, urban youngsters without safe places to play outdoors and less school P.E., it’s no wonder that D levels are low.

Although the article above cites nothing about race, this article gives us some amusing insight into what specific troublesome group likely makes up a disproportionate number of contemporary rickets sufferers:

Data from a study of 117 pregnant white and Hispanic women in Columbia showed 75 percent of them were vitamin D deficient. A study of 111 black pregnant women in Columbia found 96 percent to be deficient in the vitamin that promotes healthy bone growth in children and wards off autoimmune diseases such as diabetes and thyroid diseases

“The biggest tragedy in all this is how [color="Red"]African-Americans are being victimized because they can’t utilize the sun,” Hollis said, explaining the melanin in their skin blocks efficient intake of the sun’s vitamin D-producing ultraviolet sun rays.

A fair-skinned white person can in 30 minutes take in enough sunshine to generate 20,000 units of vitamin D in a 24-hour period, Hollis said, where it takes a black person 10 times as long to produce the same result.

Black infants are the hardest hit of all groups in the United States, he said.

"Victimization" as a word choice to describe natural genetic racial predispositions is just uproariously funny. Reality is indeed racist!