Madhumathi Rao
University of Kentucky, KY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Osteoporosis, the thinning of bone that leads to fractures, affects more than 40 million Americans. It causes more hospital admissions than heart attacks, strokes and breast cancer combined.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
- Topics
osteoporosis
age-related bone loss
bone turnover
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Test whether women with low-turnover, age-related osteoporosis gain more bone mineral density over one year on teriparatide, a bone-building drug, than on standard alendronate, using a randomized comparison and DXA bone scans.
- Determine whether blood levels of carboxylated osteocalcin (1-43/49), a bone-derived protein, alone or combined with other bone markers, can diagnose low bone turnover, validated against bone biopsy and histomorphometry.
- Classify osteoporotic women by bone turnover status using biopsy histomorphometry, including a normal-to-high-turnover group treated with alendronate as a comparison for the blood-based test.
More about the research
Yet it is not one disease. Bone loss after menopause, driven by low estrogen, involves high "bone turnover": bone is broken down faster than it is rebuilt. Age-related bone loss, which can begin in a person's 40s, usually involves low turnover, where the main problem is that too little new bone is made. Standard care starts most patients on an antiresorptive drug, which slows bone breakdown. This may work poorly for low-turnover patients and may even blunt later bone-building drugs. Doctors rarely tell the two types apart because measuring turnover requires a bone biopsy.
Why it matters
About a quarter of women over 65 have osteoporosis, and fractures place a heavy burden on older adults and the health system. If low-turnover, age-related osteoporosis responds better to bone-building drugs first, and if a simple blood test can identify it without a bone biopsy, doctors could match treatment to each patient's type of bone loss and may prevent more fractures.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Carol Everson
Medical College of Wisconsin, WI·Physiology
Test whether chronic sleep restriction after skeletal maturity impairs bone remodeling and increases fragility, by sleep-restricting male and female rats for 10 weeks and measuring bone strength, structure and cellular features.
John Fowlkes
University of Kentucky, KY·Physiology
Determine how deficiencies of insulin and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) each contribute to diabetic bone disease at the tissue, cellular and molecular levels in models of type 1 diabetes.
The school
University of Kentucky: 34 labs on PI Pages, $528M a year on research, 319 research doctorates a year.
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