We investigated the discriminative ability of total body bone-mineral expressed as the total body bone-density (TBBD) measured by dual photon absorptiometry (DPA) in 79 healthy premenopausal women, 27 healthy postmenopausal women, and 120 female osteoporotic fracture patients presenting with either Colles' fracture, vertebral fracture or femoral neck-fracture. TBBD was compared to the bone-mineral density of the lumbar spine (BMDspine) also measured by DPA, and to the bone-mineral content of the forearms (BMCforearm) measured by single photon absorptiometry (SPA). TBBD, BMDspine and BMCforearm showed that all the fracture patient groups had significantly reduced bone-mass. Using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, we found that TBBD had a tendency towards better discriminative ability than BMDspine or BMCforearm with regard to the discrimination between healthy premenopausal women and the three types of osteoporotic fractures (not significant in spinal fracture patients). BMCforearm had an intermediate position, whereas BMDspine had the smallest discriminative ability. TBBD also discriminated better between healthy postmenopausal women and hip-fracture patients than BMDspine or BMCforearm, whereas there was no significant difference between the three methods regarding the discrimination between the healthy postmenopausal women and the Colles' and spinal fracture patients. We conclude that the TBBD measurement by DPA has a discriminative potential which is better than the local spine or forearm measurements.