Body + Soul: Knowledge Is Power

A device made to diagnose osteoporosis is being marketed to track fitness goals. A midlife athlete finds out if the hype is true.
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Like many longtime runners, I’ve slacked on my strength training, preferring the pavement to the weight room. I saw the result of my slacking during my holiday travel when I tried—and failed—to lift my carry-on into the overhead bin. After a passing middle schooler hoisted my bag without blinking, my New Year’s resolution was set: Get my strength groove back, and fast.

That’s how I ended up laying on a platform in a darkened office-park room on the north side of Indianapolis as two X-ray beams passed through my body. The scan, called dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (or DEXA), is commonly used to track bone density and diagnose osteoporosis, but facilities like VisionQuest Labs offer the $150 service to anyone in quest of their quantified self.

The appointment, which took less than 30 minutes, was easy and painless. A friendly lab tech who looked like an extremely buff version of Peeta from The Hunger Games stood by as I laid still on a table for 10 minutes and a scanner passed about 8 inches above me. The radiation exposure, I was told, is “less than a cross-country flight.” I winced internally, recalling my carry-on fail. (Like air travel, your clothes stay on, but shoes and anything metal must be removed.)

After the scan, the tech handed me a printout that detailed my bone density, as well as my lean body mass and fat percentages for each part of my body. I also learned my percentile ranking for my age and gender (a nice feature for the more competitive among us) while the tech talked through everything in a nonjudgmental, anti-diet culture way. I left with a pleasant sense of purpose and clear-cut information on what parts of my mortal coil needed immediate resistance training attention. Sometimes, all you need to make an important change is a little bit of data.

KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

DEXA scans are considered more accurate for evaluating body composition than older procedures, such as skin fold measurement, electrical current tests, or air displacement devices, but they’re not perfect and are especially fallible as a weight management tool. They have a margin of error of a few percentage points, which is significant in that context. To track your overall fitness progress, you’ll want to schedule a follow-up scan in three to six months. Sooner than that “and you won’t see any results,” my tech confirmed. Unless a doctor orders a DEXA scan for bone density purposes, insurance plans typically treat it as an out-of-pocket expense. But some local labs have a first time or repeat appointment discount, and others offer multi-test packages that bundle other buzzy procedures, such as a VO2 max test to check your aerobic endurance. So when you’re scheduling, ask about any deals.