To the present authors' knowledge, quantitative methodologies for measuring bone quality and its microarchitecture have never been used to study retrieved HR prostheses.
Because bone stiffness predicts fracture independent of BMD, it is considered to be a measure of bone quality that also accounts for factors related to fracture that might not be detected by a measure of BMD alone.
We counted the number of osteoblastic (CD44-positive) cells as a quantitative measure of bone quality.
As available clinical radiographic techniques are limited in their measure of bone "quality", it should be of great interest to develop and validate testing techniques that allow the mechanical investigation of tissue and matrix properties in the clinic.
Finally, when examining the values (means ± SD) for some measures of bone quality in the standard rodent stock feed-fed reference group, it was apparent that, without formal analyses, some would differ markedly from those of animals receiving the formulated diet (e.g., iPTH, bone formation rate, trabecular separation and BMD).
Additional measures of bone quality, such as microarchitectural characteristics and bone tissue properties, including the presence of damage, may improve the diagnosis of fracture risk.
Although all of these techniques provide measures of bone quality, QCT, pQCT, and BMA are performed only in highly specialized centers and are not recommended for the routine evaluation of postmenopausal osteoporosis (grade A recommendation).
For clinical investigations into longitudinal changes in HR-pQCT-derived measures of bone quality, it is critical baseline and followup scans be matched, since bone structure and geometry vary substantially along the axial direction [ 16].
However, in spite of the above differences, extensive measures of bone quality (BMD, bone markers, mechanical testing and histomorphometric analyses) revealed no differences between the groups at necropsy (Fig. 5 and Tables 4 and 5).
