Fewer hip fractures coincide with falling rates of smoking and drinking

For the past 20 years, fewer people have been suffering hip fractures. Better bone drugs have been given the credit, but a study analyzing data from the long-running Framingham Heart Study points to two other reasons for a decline that predates osteoporosis drugs: a steady decline in smoking and heavy drinking. Among more than 10,000 people in the study, smoking rates fell from 38% in the 1970s to 15% by 2010. During that time, heavy drinking dropped from 7% to 4.5%. Hip fractures fell 4.4% each year for 40 years. Two caveats: These trends are only associations, so no direct cause-and-effect link can be made, and study subjects enrolled in 1948 and their offspring followed for 40 years were all white.