Collagen fiber disorder, not just bone density, drives hip fractures

Hip fractures in elderly patients lead to reduced mobility, loss of independence, and increased mortality risk.

For generations, a broken hip in old age has been understood as the price of thinning bone — a failure of quantity. But researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland have found that the architecture of bone, not merely its mass, may determine who fractures and who does not. Using advanced X-ray imaging capable of resolving structures a thousand times finer than a human hair, they discovered that the collagen fibers within the femoral neck are arranged in fundamentally different ways on its upper and lower surfaces — and that disorder, not just density, may be what makes bone break.

Collagen fiber disorder, not just bone density, drives hip fractures

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