Morphological analysis of bone dynamics and metabolic bone disease. Bone histomorphometry for laboratory animals

: The bone histomorphometry is well-known as the histological evaluation method for the investigation of the efficacy of various kinds of medicine on bone metabolism disorder. Recently, in addition, it is indispensable for bone researchers to clarify characteristic of bone metabolism in genetically-modified mice by means of bone histomorphometry. Thus, bone histomorphometry has broad utility. However, it would not be an exaggeration to say that researchers are interested in only numerical value of various kinds of parameters without understanding lots of information obtained from morphological observation. Especially, we have to pay attention to measurement and interpretation of parameters of bone histomorphometry in case of growing bone, because growing bone is changing its size of longitudinal and width. In this review, we would like to explain how to measure with bone histomorphometry for modeling bone in growing animals.