Osteoporosis is a silent disease. Here's what experts say about how to prevent it

Osteoporosis is sometimes called a silent thief — you usually don't know you have it until you break a bone. 

Yet the disease is common: one in three women and one in five men in Canada will suffer a fracture due to osteoporosis in their lifetimes.

Osteoporosis is a disease where your bones become weak and can break more easily. 

"It's not painful. It doesn't make you tired. So you really don't have symptoms just because you have low bone density," Dr. Carrie Ye told Dr. Brian Goldman, host of CBC's The Dose. 

"What you will feel is a broken bone, so that can be painful," said Ye, a rheumatologist and medical director of the Multidisciplinary Bone Health Clinic at Kaye Edmonton Clinic.

Experts say there are many risk factors for developing osteoporosis, and being aware of our bone health early in life can help prevent it. 

Our bones constantly undergo a process of being broken down and built up again — an ongoing struggle for renewal that keeps them healthy and strong. 

It's a race between two types of cells: osteoclasts, which eat away at bone, and osteoblasts, which build bone. 

"To have healthy bone, you want that constant turnover of eating away, but then replacing it with new bone," said Ye. 

You can think of it like road work, said Dr. Angela Cheung, a senior physician scientist and professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and the University Health Network. 

"Even with our daily activities, like running up and down stairs and doing whatever, we can do sort of micro-damage to the bone. And so the bone responds by digging up the potholes," said Cheung. 

The crew blasting away the old, damaged road is the osteoclasts, eating away the damaged bone to make space for new bone. 

"Then another team — the bone formation cells — comes in to fill the bone," she said. 

When the osteoclasts start winning the bone battle and the osteoblast cells don't get replaced fast enough, that's when you can develop osteoporosis.