Bone Abstracts

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine whether osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) patients entering adulthood should continue with bisphosphonate therapy or would benefit from switching to a RANKL blockade therapy. To address this question, we used a mouse model of type III OI.Methods: Animal studies were performed under IACUC approval. OI (oim/oim) and wild-type (WT) mice were treated from 2–26 weeks with i) saline; ii) alendronat...

Today, there are more than 450 well-characterized genetic skeletal disorders classified primarily on the basis of clinical, radiographic, and molecular criteria. Although individually rare, the overall birth incidence is estimated to be 1/5000 live births. Half a century ago, in the 1960s, individuals with disproportionate short stature were diagnosed either with achondroplasia (short-limbed dwarfism) or Morquio syndrome (short-trunked dwarfism). In time, delineation of numero...

A number of cancers develop in the skeleton or will metastasize to bone, including multiple myeloma and solid tumours such as breast and prostate cancer. Once established in the skeleton, cancer cells have the ability to modify the environment and cause devastating bone disease. The last decade has seen considerable progress in defining the critical cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible and also identified new roles for the cells of bone in the pathogenesis of metastas...

Supported by Alexion & IDS)-->Low vitamin D serum levels have been associated with a considerable number of diseases and conditions and have attracted significant attention of the scientific community as well as of health authorities all over the world. However, discussions and controversies are ongoing about the reliability, significance and correct ranges of low vitamin D serum levels. A central goa...

Introduction: Vitamin D is known to be important for bone health. Still, the significance of serum 25-hydroxy vitamin D concentrations (s-25OHD) for hip fracture risk of the elderly is uncertain. Discordant findings may in part be explained by difficulties of RCTs or large cohort studies to reach both the frail and the healthy elderly. The objectives of this study were to determine the risk of hip fractures of the elderly related to s-25OHD, including both the frail and the he...

Patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) carry a mutation in the dystrophin gene that leads to progressive muscle degeneration. In addition, DMD patients develop low bone mass especially in long bones and have high incidence of fractures. The underlying mechanisms for decreased bone mass remain unclear but muscle weakness and increased IL6 levels may play a role. Inhibition of activin/myostatin pathway has emerged as a novel approach to increase muscle mass and strength...

Background: There are no models for estimating risk of fracture in patients taking treatments for osteoporosis. Knowing a patient’s risk of fracture during treatment may help make future treatment decisions; therefore, the development of on-treatment fracture risk models is needed.Methods: To assess on-treatment fracture risk, the analysis included subjects who received denosumab (DMAb) 60 mg Q6 every 6 months for at least 1 year in either FREEDOM o...

Peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT) is receiving considerable attention in the diagnosis and monitoring of human bone diseases. It is well accepted that lower image resolution compared to micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) affects bone morphometry. With advances in micro-CT evaluation techniques such as sample-specific remodeling simulations or dynamic bone morphometry, there is the potential to also allow the application of such techniques to clinical pQCT sc...

Silk fibroin (SF) sponges are a promising scaffold material for tissue engineering due to their biocompatibility, mechanical properties, and ability to support calcium-phosphate formation in vitro. However, previous studies have shown that SF can mineralize spontaneously in the presence of culture media, which has a detrimental effect on experimental integrity when analyzing how cells deposit bone-like tissue in tissue engineering studies. In this study we analyzed th...

Introduction: Patients with multiple myeloma (MM) commonly present with devastating bone disease mediated by increased bone resorption and suppressed bone formation. We have previously shown that blocking activity of the Wnt antagonist Dkk-1 promotes osteoblastogenesis and inhibits development of bone lesions in experimental models of MM. In the 5T murine models of MM, tumour cells home to the bone marrow. Injection of 5T2MM cells into C57BLKalwRij mice results in bone disease...