Find out osteoporosis through nails
 Scientists found out that scanning nails can show whether a person has osteoporosis or not, because in nails and bones, there is an important and essential combining substance which helps our bone to be strong.
Scientists of Limerick University did this research. They concluded that if the amount of this special combining substance in nails is low, the correlative amount of this substance in bones is certainly low.
This can be considered a new simple method of discovering osteoporosis and the cost is not high. This result is intended to be widely announced at the end of this year.
Osteoporosis is a very popular disease (especially in old people) that makes bones become weak and easy to fracture is difficult to treat.
In England , one out of three has osteoporosis, and this rate in male is 1/12. Annually, according to an estimation in this country, there are 200.000 persons who have bone fracture and more than 40 persons die everyday.
Idea for this new method derived from an unexpected discovery of a doctor. While taking care of osteoporosis patients, this doctor found that their nails were softer than normal.
Immediately after that, doctor Mark Towler was appointed to analyze components of nails and bones to find the answer. He took specimens of nails and bones of 10 osteoporosis patients to examine and compared the result with specimens of nails and bones of 10 normal persons. Finally, he found that people who got the disease had the amount of combining substance disulphide (needed to combine a molecule of protein with another molecule of protein) lower than the amount of people who didn't get the disease. (In nails, disulphide helps to combine keratin, in bones, its usage is to combine protein collagen together).
Besides, scientists also did the research on other 200 persons who had previously used the method of scanning to diagnose osteoporosis. If someone who had used this method was diagnosed with osteoporosis, scientists also found that the amount of disulphide in their bones and nails was low.
Doctor Towler said: "Many people often scan bones after menopause or period of smoking in order to discover osteoporosis to have timely treatments. With the new method, everybody doesn't need to use this expensive method any more. They only send specimens of their nails to hospital and still have exact results."
Scientists are finding sponsorship to carry out following researches to state exactly having how much disulphide in bones, a person is considered having osteoporosis and at what level is being at risk.
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