Abstract
It has been indicated that silicon intake has the close relation to bone mineral density (BMD). Although clinical effects of silicon have been investigated, it has not been sufficiently evaluated whether intake of this material actually increase mechanical strength of bone from a viewpoint of stress-strain characteristic. In this study, we first performed tensile test of bones for young (10-week-old) male rats reared under silicon intake. The obtained stress-strain characteristic shows that the mechanical strength of radius for silicon intake rats have significantly strong (P=0.004) compared to those for controlled rats.Furthermore, we performed micro X-rays CT scanning of radius for silicon intake rats. We measured BMD for both the cortical bone and the spongy bone of radius using the result of CT. The measured BMD in the section adjacent to the break point of the radius was not significantly different among control and silicon intake rats. These results suggest that silicon intake affects structural change of bone, does not make BMD increasing. Analysis of structural change of bone using CT is left as future study.
