Good bone health is critical to a child’s development. When a child loses bone mineral density, their bones weaken and are at risk of breaking.
The DXA Bone Density Program at Boston Children’s measures the bone mineral density, body composition, and fat distribution of children and adolescents to best understand their fracture risk. With these measurements, our team helps colleagues who specialize in bone health to create an individualized treatment plan for a child.
DXA stands for dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. It is a safe, fast, and precise method for measuring bone density. It has limitations, though. That’s why it’s critical for DXA testing to be performed by an experienced program whose experts can carefully interpret the results. All scans are interpreted by International Society for Clinical Densitometry-certified doctors in Boston Children’s Bone Health Center.
DXA is a painless, non-invasive procedure. There are no injections or medications involved. Also, our DXA scanner is an open machine and patients are not enclosed at any time. Scans happen in a private, child-friendly room. The dose of radiation used in a DXA scan depends on the type and number of scans a child is having. But for all scan types, the dose is very low. Even for multiple scans, the dose is minimal when compared to the amount of natural background radiation the average person living in the United States is exposed to every day.
If your child has a condition related to low bone density, we’re here to get them on the proper path to keeping their bones strong and healthy.
