Estimated intracortical bone turnover in the femur of growing macaques: implications for their use as models in skeletal pathology.

Although macaques have been used widely to study the dynamics of bone remodeling, there have been few comparisons to skeletal tissue turnover in humans. This study analyzes variation in bone microstructure with respect to gender, age, and body weight in growing macaques to determine whether the pattern of osteonal remodelling in macaques is like that in analogous bones of humans. Histomorphometric measurements were made on femoral midshaft cross-sections of 54 macaques from the Cayo Santiago skeletal collection. These data show that variation in bone microstructure occurs independent of gender, age, and body weight in macaques. Moreover, intracortical bone turnover in the macaque femur is much slower than in humans, making them poor models to study the effects of weightlessness, but good models to study low turnover skeletal dysplasias.