Professor Belinda Beck

There's nothing magical about the number eight.

It's just that it's as short a time period as we could go, and we thought we would still be able to detect a change.

So twice a week, 30 minutes, eight months, we randomly allocated people who we had recruited who were post-menopause, so they had to be 60 or older, and they had low to very low bone mass, and that was tested by bone density.

I had to have a T score, and I can explain that later if you'd like, that was osteopenic or osteoporotic.

And so we specifically wanted to test the people that this would be meaningful for and that everyone was terrified about.

So there's no point testing healthy young people.

We knew that this program would be safe for them.

We had to test the people it would affect so that we knew that they could tolerate it and whether it would actually be effective.

So...

The study itself was a couple of years because to recruit 100 people to be able to randomly allocate to hire it or to the control group, we needed longer than the actual eight months.

You wouldn't get the whole group right at the start.

So it was sort of a staggered program.

The people who were randomized to control, we didn't say do nothing.

We said we'll give you a low-intensity home program twice a week, 30 minutes, eight months.

So same sort of thing, only it's what typically people would have always

for osteoporosis in the past, and we wanted to show, and I was reasonably confident, that this low-intensity home program would not help.

And it didn't.

People lost bone.

So at the start and the end, we tested bone density, so BMD, what people normally test on to test for osteoporosis.

But we also looked at the shape of bone, the size of bone.