Name: What Happens When Bone Regeneration Goes Wrong
Uploaded: 2019-07-07T06:05:47.000Z
Duration: 6 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Your skeleton has the difficult task of being strong and hard enough to hold your whole

body up, but bendy and shock-absorbing enough not to break upon minor impact.

So when something goes wrong in the bone-forming process, your bones can get weaker and the

Under a microscope, healthy bone looks like a honeycomb.

It's a matrix of flexible collagen protein with harder minerals, calcium and phosphate,

laid down on top—so it naturally has little gaps in it.

But if something interrupts the formation of healthy bone, those gaps get bigger,

like in osteoporosis, which literally means 'porous bone'.

I am one of the women's health providers here at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona.

I have been here at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona for almost nine years now.

We see patients with a lot of women's health problems, and osteoporosis is a very common

Your bones are a living, dynamic tissue, constantly regenerating themselves to stay healthy.

This is called bone remodeling, and occurs throughout our entire lives—in fact, about

every ten years, your entire skeleton has been replaced with new, healthy bone … Thanks

One is the bone chewing cell, which is called the osteoclast, which chews up the bone, and

As the old bone is being chewed up and being absorbed, the new bone is being formed by

a different type of cell called osteoblast.

A few essential ingredients are necessary to keep this bone-forming process in balance,

Your whole body relies on calcium in some form or another, so if you're not consuming

enough of it, your body will cannibalize the calcium it needs...from your bones.

So let's say that they are low blood calcium levels, and calcium is essential for muscle

So heart being a muscle, the heart is essentially muscle, in order to stabilize the calcium

levels, the calcium can be pulled from the bone.

So if there's not enough calcium or adequate amount of calcium, the bone formation process

And that impairment is what can lead to osteoporosis.

Now, while calcium is definitely an essential ingredient, other key ingredients are just

So not only just calcium, you know, there are other things that actually affect bone

density nutrition-wise, like vitamin D. Vitamin D is essential for absorption of calcium and

And all kinds of things can impair your body's absorption of calcium: too much protein, too

much salt, too much caffeine, or too much acid in your diet can all block the absorption

of calcium for use in building healthy bones.

So can habits that are bad for your body in many ways, like smoking.

It impairs the osteoblastic activity, whereas the bone chewing part or the osteoclastic

activity continues, so they can actually cause the uncoupling that we were talking about.

So avoiding all of those things and following healthy life habits will be very helpful.

But bone loss can occur because of factors beyond our control as well.

Like aging, and what hormones we have less of as we age.

So an osteoporotic bone, if you look at a normal bone which has normal bone density,

the trabeculae or the holes between the matrix, are much smaller compared to an osteoporotic

bone where there's less matrix and the pores are much bigger, making it very fragile and

And here's the thing: until your bone fractures when it shouldn't, you don't know that

There are absolutely no symptoms for osteoporosis.

So the first symptom of an osteoporosis can be a fracture.

So a woman can actually fall from a standing height or even, you know, not even no trauma,

That's why screening is very important in high-risk women to diagnose if they have osteoporosis

Because when it comes to bone loss...sex matters.

Just to reiterate, sex steroids are very helpful for bone formation, especially estrogen in

women, is helpful for bone formation and even absorption of calcium from the gut.

Women typically have lower bone density and muscle mass than men to begin with—that's

just one of the ways sexual dimorphism expresses itself in our species.

That, plus the sex hormone component, means that women, especially as they age, are more

prone to osteoporosis and fragile bones in a way that most men are not.

Around menopause, the estrogen levels are very low and it's a state called hypoestrogenism,

where there's very low estrogen in the system.

So that low estrogen by itself can actually cause some deleterious effects on the bone.

But we can do ourselves a huge favor when we're young by building our bone density

The peak bone density is reached around ages 25 to 35, so we reach our peak bone mass

So our health habits during this phase of our life actually affects how much peak bone

While we can and should build up our bone density in that peak bone-building phase,

all hope is not lost if we want to take action later in life.

So I have seen in my practice many patients improving their bone density with just purely

Vitamin D and C supplements, avoidance of smoking and excessive alcohol, are all great

ideas for building bone mass while young and keeping your bones healthy later in life.

And maybe ... try to avoid going to space if you can help it.

You know, exercise is very essential for bone building, bone formation, because exercise

and especially weight-bearing and muscle-strengthening exercises, they actually stimulate the osteoblastic

activity where there's more bone forming.

You can actually see that in people who travel to space like astronauts where there

When they come back and reach Earth, they actually lost 30% of their bone density because

So that tells us that weight bearing is very essential for bone building and bone formation.

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What Happens When Bone Regeneration Goes Wrong

entire

process

essential

metabolism