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In our efforts to stop taking hormone replacement therapy so we would not get breast cancer (boy did that backfire!), we gave up estrogen/progeserone replacement...which does impact on the quality of our bones, and many other things in our bodies as we met menopause cold turkey!
This gave a perfect opportunity for the drug companies to tap into this market...huge and we have a family of bisphosphonates that was sold to us as the next thing to take care of our bones.
There was a dentist on Long Island that noticed 5 or 6 women in his practice that had terrible jaw pain, open areas that would not heal and the common denominator was they were all taking a bisphosphonate....that led to warnings going out about the problem of osteonecrosis of the jaw.
They were then prescribed for women with breast cancer and currently many trials are going on now in the States to see if they will stop the spread of cancer to bone and in some cases to stop spread to the organs. Preliminary studies suggest they do and for the past ten years interest has been expressed in the bisphosphonates (except for a study in Italy showed no benefit).
If they do not work to stop the spread...they do help with the terrible bone pain from bone metastases and if a woman has a bone metastasis the bisphosphonate encircles it and makes the bone stronger so the bones do not fracture so easily.
BUT the downside to the bisphosphonate is the long time they stay in our system even after we stop taking them....in the case of dental extraction. I experienced this after my fall in June when I broke my shoulder and broke a tooth that had to be removed. I came off the clodronate I have been on since last March...and I waited a month before my tooth was removed....I have had teeth removed before. No problem. Healed up and got the replacement and away I went....Not so this time...months and months passed and it would not heal. It was more than 4 months before the area was healed so that I could have a partial made. In retrospect I was very lucky I did not end up with an open unhealed jaw bone and was not in the excruciating pain that is reported following extended bisphosphonate use.
This is probably more information than any one needs - but it took the bisphosphonate makers a long time before they would even acknowledge this was happening and a long time before they put warnings in the product information.
Connie
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