Bone Abstracts

Introduction: The prospective, single-arm, open-label ZOTECT study was designed to assess the effect of zoledronic acid (ZOL) on bone-marker levels and potential correlations with disease outcomes in bisphosphonate-naive patients with bone metastases.Methods: Patients with bone metastases from prostate cancer (PC; n=301) or breast cancer (BC; n=99) who have not received bisphosphonates for ≥6 months were enrolled at 98 sites in Ge...

Diabetes mellitus is the most common metabolic disease affecting more than 300 million people worldwide with a constantly growing prevalence mainly due to an increase of obesity associated type 2 diabetes. Serious macrovascular (myocardial infarction, peripheral artery disease, and stroke) and microvascular (retinopathy and nephropathy) complications account for substantial morbidity and mortality in diabetes patients. Somewhat underestimated chronic complications are the nega...

Objectives: Mice with a non-functioning vitamin D receptor (VDR mutants) develop severe secondary hyperparathyroidism, which can be rescued by a diet enriched with calcium, phosphate and lactose. In this work, we studied the effects of a low calcium challenge (CD), normal calcium (ND) and a calcium enriched rescue diet (RD) on the bone mineralization density distribution (BMDD) and osteocyte lacunae sections (OLS) in these mice.Methods: BMDD and OLS were...

Mast cells (MCs) are pro-inflammatory sensor and effector cells of the immune system. MCs seem to play a role in bone metabolism, because patients with systemic mastocytosis develop osteoporosis. MCs are present in the fracture callus during bone healing, however, their function has not yet been investigated. Here, we examined the role of MCs in the inflammatory and repair phase during fracture healing.Male 12-week old MC deficient mice (Mcpt5-Cre R-DTA)...

Interleukin-6 (IL-6) plays an important role in bone metabolism and regulates fracture healing in a presently unknown process. In the fracture callus IL-6 expression is biphasic; it peaks during the inflammatory phase and again during intramembranous and endochondral ossification (Ai-Aql et al. 2008). Few studies using IL-6 knockout mice indicate that IL-6 might be crucial for bone healing (Yang et al. 2007). However, a generalized IL-6 knockout induces multi...

Chronic calcium- and vitamin-D-deficiencies are crucial risk factors for osteoporosis. However, their significance for fracture healing is still poorly investigated, despite the clinical evidence that osteoporotic bone healing is disturbed. This study addressed the important question, whether chronic deprivation of calcium and vitamin D compromises bone repair and if this could be rescued by a supplementation post-trauma. Because clinical hints suggest that a fracture induces ...

We retrospectively analyzed the incidence of hip re-fractures in Austrian hip fracture patients devoid of anti-osteoporotic drug treatment, taking vs not taking proton pump inhibitors (PPIs).For 31,668 patients ≥50 years sustaining a hip fracture in Austria between July 2008 and December 2010, information on hip re-fractures with follow-up until June 2011 and on filed prescriptions of PPIs and anti-osteoporotic drugs between July 2007 and June 2011...

Background: The clinical presentation and the clinical phenotypic characterization and the natural history of Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP) is diverse and the natural history of the disease is to certain extent different from one patient to another.Methods: In a series of eleven patients age range from 0 to 16 years (eight girls and three boys), variable clinical presentations were the landmark of these patients. At birth, all our patients ...

Objectives: Osteocytes play a major role in bone metabolism as mechanosensors, key regulators of osteoblast and osteoclast activity and of the mineral homeostasis. Therefore the assessment of osteocytes characteristics is important to understand bone pathology. We propose to study indirectly the osteocytes by performing quantitative backscattered electron imaging to quantify the sectioned osteocyte lacunae density and size in 2D on bone samples.Methods: ...

Mutations in LRP5 cause a variety of phenotypes, including high bone mass and low bone mass disorders. In patients with high bone mass, different heterozygous mutations have been described, all of them clustering in a region including the binding pocket for DKK1 and sclerostin. The pathogenic mechanism is thought to be a gain-of-function mediated by an impaired inhibition of the canonical Wnt signalling pathway, thereby leading to increased bone modelling.<p class="abstext...