Diagnosis, assessment, and treatment of bone turnover abnormalities in renal osteodystrophy.

HE ABNORMALITIES of the skeleton in chronic kidney disease (CKD), collectively known as renal osteodystrophy, are an important cause of morbidity and decreased quality of life. In the management of patients with kidney disease, it is necessary to have a rational approach to the diagnosis and assessment of renal osteodystrophy in order to devise a treatment plan that hopefully will lead to an improved outcome. In the past, the term renal osteodystrophy was mainly equated only with abnormalities of bone turnover, but as described in the article by Cunningham and Sprague 1 in this same issue, renal osteodystrophy is a complex disorder of compromised bone strength in CKD patients. While osteoporosis is a term used to describe fragile bones prone to fracture in the general population and is most often assessed by dual x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA), renal osteodystrophy should be the principal term to describe fragile bones prone to fracture and other morbidities in CKD. Renal osteodystrophy is a function of bone turnover (assessed by bone biopsy), bone density (assessed by DEXA or quantitative CT [qCT]), and bone architecture, but the principal determinant of bone fragility in CKD is abnormal bone turnover. However, diagnosing and treating bone turnover abnormalities remains challenging. Our discussion group met to assess the current state of knowledge, understand the basis of our current therapy, and identify the information that needs to be gathered to improve the therapy of bone turnover and thereby improve the disorder of renal osteodystrophy. A number of important questions, listed in Table 1, were considered.