Nairobi — An innovative ultrasound technique could be used to assess bone quality in hard-to-reach rural regions exposed to excessive intake of fluoride in drinking water, a study has found.

According to researchers, despite about 200 million people being exposed to excess fluoride through drinking water, the extent of exposure and damage particularly in rural areas remains unexplored, thus motivating them to test the potential of an ultrasound technique in detecting bone damage among rural populations in Ethiopia.

"We found that fluoride significantly decreases bone quality, with increasing fluoride exposure detected using ultrasound," says Tewodros Rango Godebo, the study's lead author and an assistant professor at the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Tulane University in the United States, adding that fluoride pollution is a major public health issue in countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania, due to the volcanic setting in the Main Ethiopian Rift Valley that releases natural fluoride into the groundwater.

"Our findings demonstrate that we can quantitatively determine fluoride-induced deterioration of bone quality in populations using ultrasound equipment in field and rural settings," explains Godebo, adding that their study is the first to use the technique to detect bone damage in the Ethiopian Rift Valley.

But Assad Mughal, an orthopaedic surgeon at MP Shah Hospital, Nairobi, Kenya, says that although the use of ultrasound technique is a good start for screening rural populations exposed to high fluoride through drinking water, full-body bone scan is the universally accepted way of measuring bone loss.