Bone density
Reads: Bone health
You want it preserved: maintaining bone density guards against fracture and frailty with age.
What this marker reads
Living tissue in permanent turnover — built by osteoblasts, dismantled by osteoclasts, with rankl and osteoprotegerin setting the balance. Density is the running total of that contest, not a fixed property.
No body publishes a range for this marker
BONE DENSITY IS NOT A BLOOD MARKER - it is a DXA measurement, and the number is a T-score, not a concentration; it belongs on a bloodwork page only if that is made explicit. The reference standard from which the T-score is calculated is, per ISCD 2023, 'the female, white, age 20-29 years, NHANES III database'; manufacturers should use NHANES III for femoral neck and total hip T-scores and their own databases for lumbar spine. Site rules (ISCD 2023): 'Use femoral neck or total hip, whichever is lowest'; 'In certain circumstances the 33% radius (also called 1/3 radius) may be utilized'; Ward's area and the greater trochanter 'should not be used for diagnosis'. ISCD states 'The WHO densitometric classification is applicable' and retains the term 'osteopenia' while preferring 'low bone mass' or 'low bone density', but it does NOT itself print the normal or low-bone-mass cut-points. Honest GAP: no 'normal' band (commonly quoted as a T-score of -1.0 or above) is written here, because the four-category WHO table originates in the WHO Study Group report (WHO Technical Report Series 843, 1994; synopsis Kanis, Osteoporos Int 1994;4:368-381, DOI 10.1007/BF01622200) which could not be retrieved in full - the Sheffield WHO Collaborating Centre PDF now redirects, the WHO IRIS bitstream for Technical Report Series 921 (2003) errored, and neither the 2018 AHRQ evidence review, the 2019 Endocrine Society osteoporosis guideline, the 2013 IOF epidemiology recommendations nor ISCD 2023 prints the normal band. The osteopenia band above comes from the USPSTF's 2002 statement, retrieved from a web archive because the live AHRQ page has moved; it is expressed in SD below the young-adult-woman mean rather than as a labelled T-score range, and it is stated for postmenopausal women. A T-score alone does not diagnose osteoporosis in premenopausal women or men under 50, for whom ISCD uses Z-scores.
Your laboratory reads your result against its own assay, and this page does not do that for it. What is above is what a named body published and for whom; the machinery this marker reads is set out on its pathway page, and the formulas witnessed on it are below.
The machinery behind it
What raises this marker and what it goes on to move — each edge carried with its own study — is set out in full on its pathway page: Bone health →
Formulas that modulate it
Each formula page names this pathway and carries the study behind its claim.
Build a combo from your panel
Open the bloodwork builder and select every marker your lab flagged — it covers the most machinery with the fewest formulas.