Re: Dexa scan -- can they make mistakes?

Hi Starfish,

Thank you for your reply. I am 46 years old, post-menopausal since age of 34. They didn't leave out any vertebrae...I was just giving an example. Most of my lumbars 2 years ago (let's call it SCAN #1) came out to be around T -2.5; my hips were -3. to -3.3. Then the doc put me on Forteo...the side effects were so awful I only stayed on it 5 months.

Then I re-tested (the scan 1 1/2 years ago, "SCAN #2" to find my hips had improved (-1.86 to -2.5), and lumbar spine had not...my lumbars were around -4 and L3 was -5.6. That was scary. I had been doing martial arts which focused mostly on strenghtening the hips and no real weight bearing for the back...so it seems the hips benefited and not the back.

Then I found a fabulous naturopath and have consistently been taking natural HRT, calcium, vit. D, plus pilates and martial arts the last year and a half.

So yesterday's scan (SCAN #3) showed -2.8 for L 1, 2, and 3, and -3.3 for L4 and L5.

So I question whether they made a mistake on the lumbar part of SCAN #2, since it showed such a decrease compared to SCAN #1, and then such and increase with SCAN #3 -- like maybe the technician pushed the wrong button in SCAN #2 when he scanned the lumbar part? It seems to make more sense that it would have been somewhere in the -2 to -3 range in scan #2.