Osteoporosis is one of the most widely spread diseases these days. In the United States alone, there are more than 10 million people suffering from this disease. On a global scale, the number is much bigger. So, what is the osteoporosis? It is a disease by which bones of the body are losing the minerals they contain and this process makes them very thing and weak. All this means high risk of traumas and bone breaks happen very often and healing takes more time time than usual. That is a complicated But is there a way to diagnose osteoporosis at early stages and start to treat it earlier? Yes, modern medicine with all its complicated devices gives a lot of methods of diagnosing or treating symptoms of the disease. At an earlier stage, osteoporosis has no obvious symptoms and it can be destroying your body for many years and you would not even notice that. Later a patient starts to suffer from pain that bone weakness causes. So, it is necessary to make all that is possible to detect osteoporosis at the very beginning of its development. The most common way to define if you have it or not is to undergo a bone mineralization density test or as it is usually called bone density test. The bone density test is performed on equipments called DEXA ("Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry"). The device makes a series of x-ray pictures that allow calculating the actual density of patient's bones. This technique uses only small doses of x-ray, so it is pretty safe for your health to have a bone density test using this equipment. There are also other methods, like CT ("Computerized Tomography"), but they are all similar to the DEXA technique. Making a bone density test is very simple and usually doesn't need any special preparation. Your doctor will explain you everything about it on the day before the procedure. Another big question is "Who needs a bone density test?" When should you perform such a check? And the answer for that question is pretty simple. Almost all elderly people in their late 50s have to perform bone density check to ensure that they do not have osteoporosis. If the test shows any abnormality in bone density then a special treatment should be applied. There are different options how to treat osteoporosis these days. All the methods of treatment are oriented on slowing down the process of minerals loss. However, there is still no way to get it back to normal and, that is why, it is very important to start curing osteoporosis as soon as possible. In simple cases of osteoporosis, a change in a diet can restore mineral loss. If the problem is already pretty serious, then some sort of medication treatment is needed. Hormone replacement therapy or treatment with Raloxiphene, also known as Evista, is widely used. These medications can significantly slow down the actual loss of mineral in your body or, as in many cases happens, even stop it. But to make any treatment of osteoporosis effective, it is important to discover the symptoms of the disease at an early stage which makes a bone mineralization density test a must for many people.