Abstract
Mechanical stimulation to bones affects bone formation such as decrease of bone mass of astronauts under zero gravity, walking rehabilitation to bone fracture and fracture repair with ultrasound devices. Bone cells have been reported to sense and response to mechanical stimulation at cellular level morphologically and metabolically. In the view of mechanical vibrations, bone cells are deformed according to mechanical stimulation and their mechanical characteristics. In this study, sinusoidal inertia force was applied to cultured osteoblasts, which are a kind of bone cells, and effects of frequency and acceleration amplitude of mechanical vibration on the cells were investigated in respect of the cell proliferation, bone matrix generation and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) gene expression. The results to be obtained are as follows. The significant difference of cell density and bone mass generation between the non-vibrating and vibrating groups is found. ALP gene expression shows a peak to frequency at 50 Hz and the value of it is approximately 4.5 times as high as that of the non-vibrating group in the case of the acceleration amplitude of 0.5 G. ALP gene expression at 0.5 G is significantly larger than at 0, 0.125 or 0.25 G in the case of the frequency of 50 Hz.
