Background: Osteoporosis is a skeletal disease. It is still not known which of the risk factors have the greatest impact on osteoporosis development. The study aimed to determine how the selected osteoporosis risk factors contribute to the development of the disease and to assess the risk of osteoporotic fractures in older women. Methods: A cohort of 99 older females was divided into two groups (with and without osteoporosis). The risk of osteoporosis was determined using assessment forms and bone densitometry data subjected to logistic regression. The risk of osteoporotic fractures was assessed by the FRAX tool (FRAX, Center for Metabolic Bone Diseases, University of Sheffield, UK). Results: The logistic regression analysis showed that the highest risk of developing osteoporosis associated with lifestyle, mainly cigarette smoking (odds ratio: OR = 2.12), past gynecological operations (OR = 1.46), corticosteroid therapies (OR = 1.38). More than half of participants were at a medium risk of femoral neck fractures (over 90% in the osteoporotic group). Conclusion: Most of the Polish women living in care facilities are at medium risk of low-energy fractures. Smoking appeared to have the strongest effect on osteoporosis among analyzed risk factors. The results may contribute to the creation of more appropriate prevention strategies.

Background: The quality of life in osteoporosis is studied for men rather than for women. Aim of the study was to determine how bone mass density (BMD) relates to life quality components and the severity of pain felt by men affected by osteoporosis. Methods: Presented research is a cross-sectional study. The cohort of 62 men aged 65 to 85 years was divided into a group with osteoporosis (N = 27) and a group without osteoporosis (N = 35). The participants’ quality of life was measured with the Qualeffo41 Questionnaire, BMD was quantified by densitometry, and pain intensity was assessed on the Visual Analogue Scale. Results: We found that lower BMD was strongly correlated to participants’ quality of life (r = −0.72), especially the quality of leisure and social activities (r = −0.66), general health perception (r = −0.59), and mobility (r = −0.57). Pain significantly affected general health perception in older men with osteoporosis. General health assessment and pain were highly correlated with each other (r = 0.888). Conclusion: BMD and the overall quality of life of the study participants were related to each other. The strongest relationship occurred between reduced BMD and leisure and social activities component. The pain significantly affected participants’ general health perception. The results may be employed to create new prophylactic strategies to improve life quality in men with osteoporosis.

Speech disorders are significant barriers to the balanced development of a child. Many children in Poland are affected by lisps (sigmatism)—the incorrect articulation of sibilants. Since speech therapy diagnostics is complex and multifaceted, developing computer-assisted methods is crucial. This paper presents the results of assessing the usefulness of hybrid feature vectors extracted based on multimodal (video and audio) data for the place of articulation assessment in sibilants /s/ and /ʂ/. We used acoustic features and, new in this field, visual parameters describing selected articulators’ texture and shape. Analysis using statistical tests indicated the differences between various sibilant realizations in the context of the articulation pattern assessment using hybrid feature vectors. In sound /s/, 35 variables differentiated dental and interdental pronunciation, and 24 were visual (textural and shape). For sibilant /ʂ/, we found 49 statistically significant variables whose distributions differed between speaker groups (alveolar, dental, and postalveolar articulation), and the dominant feature type was noise-band acoustic. Our study suggests hybridizing the acoustic description with video processing provides richer diagnostic information.