Don’t think that only the elderly suffer from osteoporotic fractures! Now studies have shown that high blood pressure can also accelerate bone aging. No matter how old you are, you all can’t ignore it.
Taipei, Taiwan (Merxwire) – The strength and hardness of human bones will degrade with age. Osteoporosis is a common disease in modern people, but did you know that in addition to age, people with high blood pressure are also at increased risk of osteoporosis? According to the American Heart Association (AHA), New research shows that high blood pressure may accelerate bone aging.
To investigate the implicit relationship between hypertension and bone aging, the researchers compared young mice with induced hypertension to older mice without hypertension to assess the potential connection between hypertension and bone aging.
The older mice were 47 to 56 years old in humans, and the younger was between 20 and 30 years old. The researchers injected 490 ng/kg of angiotensin II into 12 young and 11 old mice in the experimental group to increase their blood pressure and get symptoms of induced hypertension; the other 13 mice in the control group, Young mice and nine old mice, were injected with a buffer solution without angiotensin II, and these mice did not develop hypertension.
After six weeks, the researchers analyzed the bone strength and density data of the four groups of mice. They found that compared with the young mice without hypertension, the bone volume fraction of the young mice with high blood pressure was significantly reduced by 24%. The spongy bones at the ends of the bones, such as the femur and spine, lost 18 percent in thickness, and fragile bones are at risk of vertebral fractures in old age.
In contrast, aged mice that received an infusion of angiotensin II did not experience similar bone loss. Throughout the study, however, the bone mass of the older mice was identical to that of the young hypertensive mice, regardless of whether they had hypertension.
The lead author of the study, Elizabeth.M.Hennen, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, USA, said that according to the experimental results, young patients with high blood pressure have a bone aging degree of about 15 to 25 years old. Patients with high blood pressure You should pay more attention to your osteoporosis.
To assess the extent to which high blood pressure affects the mice’s bones, the researchers used flow cytometry to analyze bone marrow. Found that young mice with hypertension had increased bone marrow inflammation compared to young mice that did not receive angiotensin II and that high blood pressure affects the process of bone remodeling, leading to bone loss rather than bone gain or bone balance.
Currently, the study is only based on experiments in mice, and it is unclear whether there is a similar situation with humans. The study’s conclusion shows that similar studies on humans are still needed to confirm these findings.