"Someone once told me listening to me talk is like drinking from a fire hose," Mary Leonard, MD, said to me at the end of our recent 45-minute interview. I had precisely the opposite reaction: After I left her office at Stanford Hospital, I was so parched from our conversation I walked across the street, bought a bottle of water and downed the whole thing.
Leonard, a professor of pediatrics and of medicine, has a sense of urgency for a reason: She's trying to make sure children with chronic diseases build as much bone as possible before puberty ends. Once that window closes, she and other researchers believe, it's too late to do much about it. And the likely consequence of emerging from adolescence with inadequate bone mass is early osteoporosis.
"Kids with kidney disease are, even as children, fracturing more than you would expect," Leonard said. "Kids with arthritis are fracturing more than you would expect." Ditto those with congenital heart disease, organ or bone marrow transplants, inflammatory bowel disease, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy or a history of cancer. The culprits: inflammation, immobility, malnutrition, stunted growth, steroid treatment or a combination thereof.
Leonard's work fits in perfectly with the most recent issue of Stanford Medicine, which is all about how early experiences can have far-reaching consequences for our health. As she says in my story about her research program:
We believe that once you go through puberty, you're not getting that bone back. I feel like we've described and described the problem, and now we need to do clinical trials to see what we can do to improve bone health in these patients. We just want to make sure they go into adulthood with the best, strongest skeleton possible — with bones to last a lifetime.
Leonard has several ideas about what would help — exercise interventions, medications, more aggressive treatment of the underlying condition at younger ages — and state-of-the-art imaging equipment with which to assess them. "We're on the cusp," she told me with excitement, "of transitioning from describing and describing to actually doing something."
Previously: Stanford Medicine magazine tells why a healthy childhood matters, Pediatric nephrologist Mary Leonard discusses bone health in children with chronic diseases at Childx and Pediatrics group issues new recommendations for building strong bones in kids
