Growing Bone
Second Edition
|
Edited By:James F. WhitfieldInstitute for Biological Sciences National Research Council of Canada Ottawa, Ontario, Canada ISBN: 978-1-58706-156-1 Published: 2007-10-16 This book may be purchased as an eBook (pdf) for $99, or individual chapters (pdf) may be purchased from the list below for $19. |
Growing numbers of men and many more women are suffering from crippling bone loss called osteoporosis. By 2050 50% of Americans over 50 will be at risk of, or actually have, osteoporosis. In this book the reader will meet the newest real and possible bone builders and learn how they might work. These include novel steroids, an osteogenic growth peptide (OGP), leptin from both fat cells and osteoblasts and the many kinds of statin that are widely used to reduce blood cholesterol and seem to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. But the spotlight must be directed onto the currently most promising bone growers, the 84-amino acid parathyroid hormone (PTH) and three of its 31- and 34-amino-acid fragments.
Chapters available from this book
Strontium, Calcium’s Big Brother
James F. Whitfield
Strontium (Sr) has been very recently hyped as the latest “paradigm-changing” thing in the treatmen of osteoporosis as indicated by the title of a paper by Reginster et al (2003)—“Strontium Ranelate: A New paradigm for the treatment of Osteoporosis”. When two atoms of strontium combine with ranelic ...
Surface Signaling Steroids—Real Anabolics or Pseudo-Anabolics?
James F. Whitfield
In 1998 Sicinski et al reported the synthesis of new 1a, 25-(OH)2-19-nor-vitamin D3 analogs such as 2MD (2-methylene-19-nor-(20S)-1a,25(OH)2D3) which are super-potent derivatives of the natural 1a, 25-(OH)2-vitamin D3. Four years later Shevde et al. (2002) reported that 2MD is a far more potent stim...
The Statins
James F. Whitfield
While the PTHs are by far the leading anabolic agents for treating osteoporosis and mending fractures, another family of drugs has been trying to challenge them but with very mixed results (Mundy, 2000; Whitfield, 2001, 2002a). These now old drugs were discovered by Endo and colleagues during a sear...
OGP—The Osteogenic Growth Peptide
James F. Whitfield
Scooping out the marrow or driving a nail into the marrow cavity of a bone such as the tibia, like a fracture, causes the marrow cavity to fill with a blood clot and releases a shower of osteogenic signalers such as b2-microglobulin, IGF-I, PDGF, TGF-bs, and VEGF from platelets, shocked bone-lining ...
The Clinical Prospects of the Invincible PTHs
James F. Whitfield
The osteoporosis market is a rapidly growing “marketer’s” dream. And several years ago there was no known bone-growing drug—only the ever-worrisome (for cancerophobics) estrogens and the other antiresorptives. So the marketeers at Eli Lilly decided that the old hPTH-(1-34) would be the ideal drug wi...
How Might PTHs Stimulate Bone Growth?
James F. Whitfield
To tackle the formidable job of understanding how the PTHs stimulate bone growth in humans, rodents and other animals (Fig. 17) we must know where and how things start. What signals do they send into their target cells via the PTHR1 receptors to trigger osteogenesis? However, before going on I must...
The Amazing Bone-Anabolic PTHs
James F. Whitfield
Clearly the antiresorptives are far from being the ‘Holy Grails’ of osteoporosis therapy although they do break the vicious cyle of escalating remodeling and microdamage (Fig. 10). Since by the time of their first fracture, the bones of osteoporotic postmenopausal women have undergone considerable m...
Menopause and Bone Loss
James F. Whitfield
So far it has seemed that estrogen is the primus inter pares of an ever-growing number of agents that control bone growth and strength in both women and, perhaps surprisingly, men (Baylink et al, 1999; Klein, 1999; Stevenson and Lindsay, 1999; Vanderschueren et al., 2000). Now it appears that bones ...
BMUS—The Microcrack Fixers
James F. Whitfield
At first sight bones are inert, rock-like things that store 99% of the body’s calcium and consist of a hard shell, the cortex, that encloses a deceptively delicate lattice of struts and plates (Jee, 2001) (Fig. 1).The cortex is made of hard, 5%-10% porous, calcified armor plate with embedded cells c...
What Is Osteoporosis?
James F. Whitfield
Osteoporotic postmenopausal women don’t need to fall or hit something to break their fragile bones. Their, hips, ribs, wrists and especially vertebrae are apt to be broken or crushed by bending spines, muscle pullings and the low-impact bumps of ordinary daily activities. In fact the greatest bone b...
