Control Bones can be Important in Bone Adaptation Studies
We have found it astonishing that there is very little mention in the bone adaptation literature of using a “control bone”. In other words, a bone that has a well described load history; hence it can be used as a reference for what might be expected in terms of cortical and trabecular structural or material variations. “Control bones” can be simply loaded, like sheep and deer calcanei or they can be more complexly loaded like sheep tibiae and turkey ulnae. Some studies might benefit having “control bones” that span the range from low-to-high load complexity (for more details see the separate section entitled “Load Complexity Categories”).
Click here to see how we have used sheep and deer calcanei as control bones.