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In this month’s issue of Guidelines in Practice, Juliet Compston, Professor of Bone Medicine at the University of Cambridge School of Medicine and Chair of the National Osteoporosis Guideline Group (NOGG), discusses the newly launched guideline from NOGG on the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis (click here). With NICE currently developing technology appraisals on the primary and secondary prevention of osteoporosis, and a clinical guideline on the prevention of osteoporotic fractures in high-risk individuals, why was it necessary for NOGG to produce its own guidance?

This can be answered, in part, by the delays to the technology appraisals and clinical guideline and the frustrations that this has caused, as highlighted by a recent letter to The Times.¹ This letter, published on Monday 15 September and signed by 36 clinical leaders, coincided with a second appeal hearing held by NICE on these appraisals. The signatories claim that during the 6 years that the development programme has been running, ‘NICE has failed to develop workable guidance on the primary and secondary prevention of osteoporosis, allowing patients to access the range of cheap and effective treatments, which could have prevented many of these hip fractures’.

With the timing of the publication of the technology appraisals and clinical guideline uncertain, NOGG—in collaboration with the European Society for Clinical and Economic Aspects of Osteoporosis and Osteoarthritis and with the support of a number of professional bodies (click here)—developed a consensus guideline that aims to fill the current gap in clinical guidance. It also provides recommendations that embrace the recent advances in the assessment of individuals at high risk of fracture.

You can view a summary of the NOGG guideline online (click here), and a sponsored checklist is available (click here) in this issue of Guidelines in Practice that will help you with implementation.

Julia Morris, Editor
julia.morris@mgp.ltd.uk

References

1. www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article4752843.ece. G