A Mechanical Device to Evaluate the Effects of Dynamic Loading in Weak-acid Medium on the Bioapatite of Devitalized Cortical Bone.

A new device that enables the application of controlled mechanical loads to devitalized cortical bone blocks in liquid media mimicking physiological environment is described. In the setup, it is possible to evaluate elimination of calcium from a bone during the exposure to slightly acidic media in the presence or absence of periodic controlled mechanical load. In the test experiments with the fragments of cortical bone, the level of calcium elimination from a bone during the experiment has shown the visible dissimilarity for the loaded bone and the unloaded one. The structural alterations in the apatite of the bone after the experiments in the setup have been studied by X-ray diffraction (XRD), which has shown that the lattice microstrain parameter of the bone mineral noticeably increases in the loaded bone compared with unloaded, while the crystallite size shows only a trend to slight increasing. This simple and easy to reproduce bone-loading setup could be used for in vitro studies of the bone material stability under mechanical loading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]