Femoral neck
Also called: femoral neck fracture site
What it means
The femoral neck is the angled part of bone joining your hip ball to your thigh bone shaft, and it's the most common site for hip fractures.
Hip fractures at the femoral neck are a serious risk as you age, and this is a site doctors specifically track on your bone scans and risk calculations.
The femoral neck is the angled piece of bone that connects the ball of your hip joint to the long shaft of your thigh bone. It's a key area to know about because most hip fractures happen right here. This spot is also one of the two or three places measured on a bone density scan, alongside the lumbar spine and total hip.
What makes the femoral neck interesting is how it gets loaded. It takes the most strain during things like standing on one leg, climbing stairs, or moving sideways, while ordinary flat-ground walking barely challenges it. That's part of why walking alone isn't a reliable way to keep this particular area strong — it responds to the kinds of loading it doesn't usually get from a casual stroll.
On a bone density report, your femoral neck T-score is looked at on its own because it often tells a different story than your spine. The spine is mostly trabecular bone that turns over quickly, while the hip is more cortical, so the two can disagree. Diagnosis is based on whichever valid site is lowest, and femoral neck density can also feed into tools like FRAX, which estimates your 10-year fracture risk rather than just giving a single score.
How sure is this?
Graded Established Science: Supported by broad scientific consensus and decades of research. Read each study with its grade in mind. One study is a piece of the picture, not the whole of it.
Where the Academy teaches it
This page is the short version. The lessons teach it in full, with the context around it and a quiz to lock it in.
Questions people ask about this
Bone adapts to the specific mechanical forces placed on it, not just to how much you move in general. Walking is great for overall health, but it mostly loads the legs in a mild, repetitive way — it doesn't put strong, varied loading through the spine or hip in the way those sites actually need to maintain their density.
Read the full answer →Related words
A hip fracture is a break at the femoral neck, the narrow part of bone connecting the hip joint ball to the thigh…
A T-score shows how your bone density compares to a healthy young adult, measured in standard deviations, and it's…
A DEXA scan is a low-radiation X-ray test that measures how much mineral is in your hip and spine bones, giving you…
FRAX is a free online tool that calculates your 10-year probability of having a major osteoporotic fracture or hip…
Cortical bone is the dense, hard outer layer of bone that forms a protective shell and resists bending and twisting…
Trabecular bone is the spongy, honeycomb-like bone found inside structures like your spine and hip, providing…
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