Duke Medicine: Women at Workouts

Open a yearbook from any high school across the country, and you'll see basketball, volleyball, and soccer teams full of young female athletes bursting with health -- or so it would appear. But appearances can be deceiving, as Alison Toth, MD, knows all too well.

"More than a few of these teenagers could be developing bones as porous and brittle as a 50-year-old woman's," says Toth, director of the Duke Women's Sports Medicine program. Such young women, she explains, are often victims of the 'female athlete triad' -- a syndrome in which young women don't eat enough to make up for the calories they expend.