Validación de encuestas de tamización para decisión de densitometría ósea en mujeres colombianas

objectives: to assess in a group of colombian women the validity of six different screening tools as decision rules for referring them for bone densitometry, and to establish their correlation with bone mineral density (bmd). design: concordance and agreement with gold standard; correlation without cut points. methods: women who were referred for bmd determination by dxa examination in lumbar spine and hip were diagnosed as normal, osteopenic and/or osteoporotic according to world health organization criteria. before the dxa was made, the screening tools abone, nof, orai, osiris, ost and score were applied, and then their correlation coefficient among them and the bmd was made. receiver operating characteristic (roc) curves were made for each scale and a comparison was made among them. sensitivity, specificity, and false positives and negatives of each scale were calculated. results: osteopenia was found in 46.2% and osteoporosis in 33.6% of the 253 studied women, with an average age of 57 years old. correlation among scales and bmd was significant between 0.5 and 0.6. the area under the curve (auc) was higher in ost, orai, osiris and score, all of them < 0.8. all the tools had high sensitivity, but low specificity, with a high proportion of false positives and negatives. conclusions: the screening tools as decision rules for referring subjects to bone densitometry had good correlation with bmd, but they had high proportions of false positives and negatives.