Study finds bone cement no better than placebo

NEW YORK – A common treatment that uses medical cement to fix cracks in the spinal bones of elderly people worked no better than a sham treatment, the first rigorous studies of the popular procedure reveal.

Pain and disability were virtually the same up to six months later, whether patients had a real treatment or a fake one.

Tens of thousands of Americans each year are treated with bone cement, especially older women with osteoporosis, some of them stooped and unable to stand up straight. The treatment is so widely believed to work that the researchers had a hard time getting patients to take part when it was explained that half of them would not get the real thing.

“All of us who do the procedure have seen apparently miraculous cures,” said Dr. David F. Kallmes, a radiologist at the Mayo Clinic who led one of the studies. But he said there were also “miraculous cures” among those who got the fake treatments.

The researchers said it is yet another example of a medical procedure coming into wide use before good studies are done to show that it is safe and effective. Medicare pays $1,500 to $2,100 for the outpatient procedure.

Bone cement has long been approved for many medical uses, but this particular use had not been tested against a placebo procedure until now.

The findings, published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine, mean patients and doctors need to review the options together, wrote Dr. James N. Weinstein of Dartmouth Medical School in an accompanying editorial.