PhD Studentship: Understanding osteogenic potential using musculoskeletal and finite element modelling

Osteoporosis is a bone-wasting disease that makes bones thin, weak and more likely to break. Breaking bones in the hip and spine is painful and life-changing. It affects more women (1 in 2) than men (1 in 5) because women have smaller bones, lose bone-protecting hormones after the menopause and typically experience less impact activity earlier in life. Osteoporosis can be prevented or delayed by stimulating bone via load bearing exercise earlier in life. However, despite some generic advice being available (for example 50 impacts a day), there is limited advice on how to make up an appropriate exercise regimen for bone health and frailty prevention. With very limited advice on exercise selection, frequency, duration and intensity.

Many studies have investigated the effects of different exercise modalities on bone health however, these studies vary in exercise selection, intervention length, frequency and intensity giving a heterogeneous body of literature and ultimately leading to poor understanding of the features of exercise that maximise osteogenic growth that could be easily integrated into daily living. A key driver of osteogenic growth and remodelling is the peak intensity of stress a bone experiences during a bout of exercise. This is difficult to measure in vivo, as it requires highly invasive surgery to implant bone strain gauges.

Alternatively, modelling is a valuable non-invasive method by which individual responses of bones to exercise can be estimated, allowing both highly subject and site-specific responses to exercises to be estimated, but also allowing “what if” questions to be investigated. Previous work by our group has developed an initial bone stress modelling data pipeline that can estimate bone stress in the femoral neck during activities. This project aims to build on this work by investigating the effects of different exercise interventions on bone stress, investigating individual responses to exercise (e.g. the effect of the size and shape of individuals bone on the estimated stress) and correlating a simple to use metric (e.g. data from an inertial measurement unit or accelerometer) with estimated stresses in order to allow an easy to use metric to be presented to the public to engage with their bone health in a meaningful way.

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