Bone Abstracts

Background: The mineral content of the skeleton in children may be estimated by a number of methods including DXA-scanning, ultrasound, pQCT-scanning and from plain radiographs. Recently, a new method offering an estimating of the bone mineral content in children based on computerised assessment from hand radiographs has been introduced. The new measure is named bone health index (BHI) and expresses the mineral content in the metacarpal bones divided by the volume of the same bones. However, it is not clear to what degree BHI correlates to bone mineral content measured by DXA.

Aim: The aim of the present study was to compare bone mineral content in healthy Danish children measured with DXA and BHI.

Methods: 85 healthy Danish children were included in the study. The children were all part of the CHAMPS-study-DK. As a part of CHAMPS-study-DK, the children were DXA-scanned on a Lunar Prodigy (GE Medical Systems, Madison, WI, USA), equipped with ENCORE Software (version 12.3, Prodigy; Lunar Corp., Madison, WI, USA). The total body less head (TBLH) BMC, BMD and BA were measured. On the same day, radiographs of the participants’ left hand were taken. The BHI was determined by the BoneXpert Software (Visiana, Holte, Denmark).

BMC, BMD and BA in each child were correlated to BHI by simple linear regression analyses (SPSS, version 19).

Results: BHI correlated well to BMD with r²=0.56 (P<0.001). BHI also correlated highly significantly (P<0.001) to BMC and BA, although the r² were lower (0.46 and 0.38 respectively).

Conclusion: BHI may offer a new method to estimate the mineral content of the bones in children.

The present data will be supplied with additional data on the whole study population, which are 700 children. Furthermore, the methods will be compared by Bland–Altman plot, and the change in BHI over a 2-year period will be compared to the change in BMD and BMC during the same period. These data will be available at the time of the conference.