When we are young, our mothers always stress to us that we need to drink our milk so that our bones grow to be strong and healthy. What we don’t realize at the time is that our mom is right. When we are young, our bones grow and grow until we become an adult. What happens next is the question. According to Gerard Tortora and Bryan Derrickson, “osteoporosis affects 10 Million people a year in the United States” (Tortora and Derrickson 203). Osteoporosis is a bone disorder where your bones start to loose bone mass due to your body losing calcium. Osteoporosis primarily affects middle-aged and elderly women (Tortora and Derrickson 203).
Dr. Rhut believes he has found a way to use hormones in the body to help fight osteoporosis. In recent studies that Dr. Rhut has done, he has found that by using negative allosteric modulators to release parathyroid hormones into the bloodstream, this will stimulate new bone formation. When your concentration of calcium is too low, your body senses this. It will then release PTH. This will raise your calcium concentration until the calcium sensing receptors on the parathyroid cell are activated. Once activated, it reduces PTH release (arthritis foundation).
The negative allosteric modulators will take a quite a few more years before they will be passed to use on patients. If passed, this will definitely help cut down on the amount of people that have osteoporosis. This will reduce the risk of so many hip fractures, or fractures in general, in the elderly population. This will also help with bone shrinkage, height loss, hunched backs, and bone pain (Tortora and Derrickson).
Tortora, Gerard J., and Derrickson, Bryan. Principles of Anatomy & Phisiology .13th ed. Hoboken:
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2011. Print.
“Turning on Hormones to Fight Osteoporosis.” Research Alert. Arthritis Foundation, 2008. Web. 6 Oct.
2013.