Bone Abstracts

Bones’ fracture resistance is achieved in vivo by adaptation to habitual loading. Aged bone can adapt to exercise1 but in female rodents ageing impairs the adaptive response to artificial loading2,3. This inconsistency led us to investigate whether treadmill exercise, sufficiently mild to not itself stimulate new bone formation, could rescue aged bone’s diminished response to artificial loading.Young adult 17-week...

Aim: We explored the hypothesis that idiopathic hypercalciuria (IH) causes increased bone loss in early post-menopausal women.Materials and methods: We studied 41 postmenopausal women with IH. Inclusion criteria: i) recently (<6 months) diagnosed and untreated IH, ii) postmenopausal status >2 years, and iii) normal renal function. Exclusion criteria: i) all causes of hypercalciuria other than IH and ii) use of any medication for osteoporosis 1-ye...

Introduction: Osteocytes play a major role in the bone remodelling unit (BRU). Thus, we hypothesize that mitochondrial bioenergetics impairment and mitochondrial/peroxisomal fatty acid β-oxidation unbalance is a cause of osteocytes metabolic decline during 17β-estradiol (E2) reduction. E2 and a phytochemical substitute, coumestrol (COU) were used (30 mg/kg during 24 h in ovariectomized rats in order to compare bone loss with sham-operated animal...

Objectives: Childhood osteoporosis can be treated with i.v. bisphosphonates in order to improve bone mass and density. The aims of this study were to evaluate the safety and efficacy of 6-monthly zoledronic acid (ZA) in children with osteoporosis.Methods: A retrospective cohort study of 27 patients (16 males and 11 females) were treated with 6-monthly ZA (0.05 mg/kg per dose) for a minimum of 1 year. Seventeen patients were immobile, 4 had steroid-induce...

Objectives: To determine any relationship of serum concentrations of osteoprotegerin (OPG), sRANKL and sRANKL:OPG ratio with idiopathic hypercalciuria (IH) in children, as there is some evidence of increased bone resorption in these patients.Methods: In a prospective study, twenty four children of median age 6.5 years (range 2.3–16.4) with IH (five had urolithiasis and two nephrocalcinosis) were examined at the time of diagnosis and after 3 months o...

Objectives: The ability to discriminate bone fractures that result from non-accidental injuries and those that result from underlying bone fragility is limited by the lack of clinical instrumentation to directly measure bone mechanical properties. The BioDent Hfc (Active Life Scientific) is an experimental device that has been validated for measuring cortical bone fracture resistance in adults. We are currently developing protocols to test the feasibility of its use in infants...

Primary hyperparathyroidism is extremely rare in childhood and adolescence. Here we report a clinical case of a 15-year-3-month-old boy who began 2 years before with pain in his knees, genu varum, and fatigue. Physical examination showed severe genu valgum with an inter-malleolar distance of more than 30 cm. Biochemical tests showed hypercalcemia (12.2 mg/dl), hypophosphatemia (2.3 mg/ dl), hypercalciuria (6.4 mg/kg per day), high alkaline phosphatase (2812 IU/l), low 25-hydro...

Background: The tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) imatinib is applied as front-line treatment in adult and pediatric patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in order to selectively inhibit the causative oncogenic BCR-ABL1 tyrosine kinase. However, TKIs exhibit off-target effects on further kinases involved in the regulation of bone metabolism. As consequence, pediatric patients display longitudinal growth retardation while on imatinib treatment. As CML is a rare disease in ...

Fractures in infancy raise the spectre of child abuse; it has been suggested that lack of vitamin D could result in bone abnormalities that could predispose to fractures. We utilised a mouse model system to investigate whether vitamin D deficiency in utero alters early bone growth and development.C57BL/6 female mice received vitamin D deficient or replete diet for 6 weeks, then mated and continued on their respective diets until weaning. Pups were culled...

Objective: Low dietary calcium intakes and increasing adiposity in Indian adolescents may increase their risk of hypertension (Sanwalka et al., Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2010, Khadilkar et al., Int J Pediatr Obes. 2010). Therefore, the aim of the present study was to explore association of dietary calcium intakes and body composition with blood pressure in 10–14 year old Indian adolescents.Method: 370 apparently healt...