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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter May 22, 2008

Femoral stiffness and strength critically depend on loading angle: a parametric study in a mouse-inbred strain

  • Romain Voide , G. Harry van Lenthe and Ralph Müller

Abstract

Biomechanical tests of human femora have shown that small variations of the loading direction result in significant changes in measured bone mechanical properties. However, the heterogeneity in geometrical and bone tissue properties does not make human bones well suited to reproducibly assess the effects of loading direction on stiffness and strength. To precisely quantify the influence of loading direction on stiffness and strength of femora loaded at the femoral head, we tested femora from C57BL/6 inbred mice. We developed an image-based alignment protocol and investigated the loading direction influence on proximal femur stiffness and strength. An aluminum femoral phantom and C57BL/6 femora were tested under compression with different loading directions. Both tests, with the aluminum phantom and the murine bones, showed and quantified the linear dependence of stiffness on loading direction: a 5° change in loading direction resulted in almost 30% change in stiffness. Murine bone testing also revealed and quantified the variation in strength due to loading direction: 5° change in loading direction resulted in 8.5% change in strength. In conclusion, this study quantified, for the first time, the influence of misalignment on bone stiffness and strength for femoral head loading. We showed the extreme sensitivity of this site regarding loading direction.


Corresponding author: Ralph Müller, Institute for Biomechanics, ETH Zürich, HCI E357.2, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 10, 8093 Zürich, Switzerland Phone: +41-44-632-4592 Fax: +41-44-632-1214

Received: 2007-6-14
Accepted: 2008-2-20
Published Online: 2008-05-22
Published Online: 2008-5-22
Published in Print: 2008-06-01

©2008 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin New York

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