Anatomical sector analysis of load-bearing tibial bone structure during 90-day bed rest and 1-year recovery

The aim of this study was to investigate whether the bone response to long bed rest-related immobility and during subsequent recovery differed at anatomically different sectors of tibial epiphysis and diaphysis. For this study, peripheral quantitative tomographic (pQCT) scans obtained from a previous 90-day 'Long Term Bed Rest' intervention were preprocessed with a new method based on statistical approach and re-analysed sector-wise. The pQCT was performed on 25 young healthy males twice before the bed rest, after the bed rest and after 1-year follow-up. All men underwent a strict bed rest intervention, and in addition, seven of them received pamidronate treatment and nine did flywheel exercises as countermeasures against disuse-related bone loss. Clearly, 3-9% sector-specific losses in trabecular density were observed at the tibial epiphysis on average. Similarly, cortical density decreased in a sector-specific way being the largest at the anterior sector of tibial diaphysis. During recovery, the bed rest-induced bone losses were practically restored and no consistent sector-specific modulation was observed in any subgroup. It is concluded that the sector-specific analysis of bone cross-sections has potential to reveal skeletal responses to various interventions that cannot be inferred from the average analysis of the whole bone cross-section. This approach is considered also useful for evaluating the bone responses from the biomechanical point of view.