McCall McPhersonFounder, Modern Thyroid Clinic.

Revolutionizing Bone Health: The Active Tests You Need

17 Apr 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:27

Short interview segment explaining active bone health biomarkers—CTX (bone resorption) and P1NP (bone formation)—as leading indicators that reflect current bone turnover. The speaker contrasts these tests with DEXA scans (a lagging indicator of bone density requiring years between measurements) and advocates a preventative monitoring approach: baseline biomarkers, targeted interventions, and short-interval retesting to guide treatment and improve long-term bone density outcomes.

Chapters

Called an active bone loss test, called the CTX, CT Low Peptide Test. The other is called a bone builder test, the P1NP. And these tests look at the activity level of cells that are breaking down and building up your bone right now, present day. So DEXA scan looks at did you do the right things for the past year and a half or two years? And it's going to give you a snapshot and tell you that. But you have to have at least two of those objective data points, two years apart to know that's too long to implement a protocol hoping that you're doing the right things. Ctx, if it's really high or elevated, you can see that come down in weeks to months. You can see the bone formation come up. And when you look at it this way, now you have these leading indicators that you can improve and target to make sure the lagging indicator, the bone density, is where it needs to be two years down the road. So you get a baseline of the markers, you give an intervention, then you look and retest again to see what the impact of that intervention was and if it's improved, if it's brought the bone loss down, boosted it up, and if it didn't, now we go in, we make adjustments until it does.
So you're saying there's a way, there's more of a preventative approach as opposed to a treatment after it's already occurred approach, which is.