video: Professor John A. Kanis speaks of the success of FRAX, and the new tools available at the World Congress on Osteoporosis in Florence, Italy. view more
Credit: Gilberto Lontro/IOF
FRAX® is a free online fracture-risk calculator (http://www.shef.ac.uk/FRAX/) that has been developed by the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Metabolic Bone Diseases at the University of Sheffield, UK. More and more physicians around the world are using the tool as an aid in making informed treatment decisions in the course of a clinical assessment of their patients.
FRAX® calculates the 10-year probability of a major fracture and until now was only accessible as an online questionnaire in clinical settings, via the internet.
On the occasion of the World Congress on Osteoporosis 2010 (IOF WCO-ECCEO10), currently taking place in Florence, Italy, the developers of FRAX®, in conjunction with IOF, have announced that the tool will soon be more easily accessible to physicians and patients alike, thanks to the development of the FRAX® Pad and iPhone Application.
In a first stage, the FRAX® Pad will be available in English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Swedish. This one-page questionnaire in easy tear-sheet form, can be completed by a patient waiting in a doctor's office, by a practice nurse or by the physician themselves and is particularly useful where no internet access exists.
Similarly the FRAX® iPhone Application will vastly increase the accessibility of the FRAX® tool to thousands more physicians and health care practitioners worldwide. Speaking today in Florence, Professor John Kanis, developer of FRAX®, stated that he was delighted to see that the diagnostic tool was becoming increasingly available and utilized worldwide by so many healthcare providers – "Greater accessibility will help more doctors make informed treatment decisions, ensuring that high risk individuals are identified and ultimately leading to the more effective management of patients with osteoporosis," he said.
For all details on IOF FRAX® tools, go to the IOF website at - http://www.iofbonehealth.org/health-professionals/frax.html
About FRAX®
The ultimate aim of the clinician in the management of osteoporosis should be to reduce the risk of fractures. Treatment decisions must be made through good clinical judgement and through improved identification of patients at high risk. FRAX® is a simple web-tool that integrates clinical information in a quantitative manner to predict a 10-year probability of major osteoporotic fracture for both women and men in different countries. Developed at the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Metabolic Bone Diseases, University of Sheffield, UK, the tool assists primary health care providers to better target people in need of intervention, improving the allocation of healthcare resources towards patients most likely to benefit from treatment. The tool can be accessed free of charge at http://www.shef.ac.uk/FRAX/. The web site receives about 20,000,000 hits /year.
ABOUT IOF
The International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) is a nongovernmental umbrella organization dedicated to the worldwide fight against osteoporosis, the disease known as "the silent epidemic". IOF's members – committees of scientific researchers, patient, medical and research societies and industry representatives from around the world – share a common vision of a world without osteoporotic fractures. Launched in 1998 with the merger of the European Foundation for Osteoporosis (EFFO, founded in 1987) and the International Federation of Societies on Skeletal Diseases, IOF now represents 195 societies in 92 locations. http://www.iofbonehealth.org