Bone health: quality vs. quantity

Abstract

Healthy bone has the ability to resist deformation and fracture, while adapting to applied mechanical loads. These properties of bone depend on characteristics of its extracellular matrix. This review focuses on the contribution of bone quality and quantity to bone health and highlights current and promising future clinical approaches to measure bone health in the pediatric population. Bone’s unique material properties are derived from its highly organized, hierarchical composite structure, together with its modeling and remodeling dynamics and microdamage mechanisms. Pediatric bone diseases and disorders affect the biological processes that regulate its quality, negatively impacting the extracellular matrix and causing bone fragility. Laboratory bone analysis from human biopsies or animal models of human bone diseases allows high detail examination of the mechanisms contributing to bone fragility. Conversely, clinical measurements of bone fragility are difficult and limited due to the inaccessibility of the material. Because bone quality directly affects fracture resistance, both structure and composition should be used in fracture risk calculation rather than bone mineral density or bone quantity alone. Thus, to advance clinical evaluation of bone fragility, future studies are needed to determine which characteristics of bone quality can be applied to clinical practice to predict bone fragility. New and effective clinical tools are needed to predict fracture risk taking bone quality into consideration. Key Concepts(1)Bone quality and bone quantity are both fundamental for resistance to deformity and fracture.(2)Pediatric bone diseases and disorders alter bone’s composition and structure, compromising bone quality and increasing vulnerability to fracture.(3)Current clinical approaches to assess bone fragility and fracture risk rely mainly on bone quantity measurements from DEXA scans.(4)DEXA bone mineral density poorly correlates with bone’s resistance to fracture, both in adults and children.(5)Future clinical approaches to measure bone health should account for bone quality in order to predict fracture risk.