No Bones About It: Wild Gorillas Don't Develop Osteoporosis Like Their Human Cousins
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:
No bones about it: Wild gorillas don't develop osteoporosis like their human cousins:
In a study of gorilla skeletons collected in the wild, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers and their international collaborators report that aging female gorillas do not experience the accelerated bone loss associated with the bone-weakening condition called osteoporosis, as their human counterparts often do. The findings, they say, could offer clues as to how humans evolved with age-related diseases.
[Christopher Ruff, Ph.D., professor at the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine] and his colleagues were able to analyze the bones of 34 wild mountain gorillas-16 females and 17 males, ages 11 to 43 years. This spans the full adult range of the species. Using a specialized CT scanner brought to Rwanda, the researchers examined the leg, arm and spine bones from each animal (including the femur, tibia, radius, ulna, humerus and lumbar vertebrae), taking measurements of bone density and geometry.
[...] The researchers found some features of skeletal aging among the gorillas that are similar to those observed in humans, including a general widening of the diameter of long bones and thinning of the bone wall. However, the gorilla bones did not show any of the accelerated bone mineral loss associated with age-related osteoporosis in human skeletons. In humans, women tend to lose bone mineral density more than men. However, in the mountain gorillas, there was no significant difference in bone density or overall strength between older males and females.
These differences, Ruff says, may be explained by the fact that gorillas continue to have offspring throughout their lives, maintaining hormonal levels that help protect them from bone loss. Higher activity levels also may help grow and then maintain stronger bones.
Journal Reference:
Skeletal ageing in Virunga mountain gorillas, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0606)
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