Physical activity and bone mass: exercises in futility?
Abstract
Growing bone responds to low or moderate exercise through significant additions of new bone in both cortical and trabecular moieties and results in adaptation through periosteal expansion and endocortical contraction. Intracortical activation frequency declines in growing bone in response to exercise, reducing porosity and the remodelling space. These adaptations can be maintained into and throughout adulthood. Young bones have a greater potential for periosteal expansion than aging bone, allowing them to adapt more rapidly and efficiently to an acute need for increased strength, but a threshold level of activity exists above which some bones respond negatively by suppressing normal growth and modelling activity, reducing geometric, mechanical and material properties in cortical and trabecular bone. From cross-sectional studies, differences in bone mass between exercising and non-exercising adults are generally less than 10%, but do not account for exercise history which may be very important, and often fail to consider important confounding variables. There is sufficient longitudinal data to demonstrate that moderate to intensive training can bring about modest increases of about 1-3% in bone mineral content (BMC) of men and premenopausal women. In young adults very strenuous training may increase BMC of the tibia up to 11% and its bone density (BD) by 7%, but may represent periosteal woven bone formation in response to excessive strain. Some evidence shows that exercise…
Read the paper
Related studies
- Development of a crushable foam model for human trabecular bone
- Data-driven motion compensation in HR-pQCT.
- Modeling of structure, quality, and function in the orthodontic patient
- Exploring the mechanism of Heidihuang Pill in the treatment of osteoporosis based on network pharmacology, molecular docking, and experimental validation
- Effect of fabric on the accuracy of computed tomography-based finite element analyses of the vertebra
- Use of interventions involving virtual reality tasks during the climacteric: a systematic review
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.