Introduction. Osteoporosis is a metabolic skeletal disease characterized by
bone mineral density reduction, which may lead to an increased risk of bone
fractures. Obesity is a condition of excessive body fat that causes or
aggravates many public health problems. As it is easy to be measured, body
mass index is widely used as an index of the degree of obesity. Material and
Methods. The study included 1.372 female orthopedic patients between the
ages of 30 to 79 years who visited the Clinical Centre of Vojvodina in Novi
Sad to have a dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) examination in the
period from March, 2010 to June, 2013. The following anthropometric data
were collected: body mass index, body weight, height, dual-energy x-ray
absorptiometry T-score and bone mineral density (BMD), as well as some other
data. Results. The mean age was 62.08 years, the mean weight was 73.59 kg
and the mean height was 1.6 m. There were 392 participants in the group of
normal body mass index, 14 participants were underweight, and 966 were
overweight and obese. In the overweight and obese group, 25.25% participants
had osteoporosis, 35.4% had osteopenia and 39.33% had the normal T-score. In
the normal body mass index group, 42.34% of the participants had
osteoporosis, 29.3% had osteopenia and 28.31 had the normal T-score. In the
underweight group, 57.14% of the participants had osteoporosis, 21.42% had
osteopenia and 21.42% had the normal T-score. Conclusion. No strong
correlation between body mass index and bone mineral density was found in
our study, but it is obvious that there was a stronger correlation between
body mass index and bone mineral density of the total hip than between body
mass index and bone mineral density of the lumbar spine.