[Roentgen spectrometry comparison of currently available bone substitutes]

The crystalline structure of hydroxyapatite (HA) and tricalciumphosphate (TCP) used as bone regeneration materials affects their physical and probably also their biological properties. Varying velocities of the HA solution process seem to be correlated to different results in powder diffraction analysis (RDX) [1], a validated, routine procedure in minerology [2, 6] to analyse crystallized materials. As far we know there are no comparative RDX analyses for the TCP materials in clinical use.

The dimension and quality of the crystallization of several bone regeneration materials are analysed by RDX.

The materials analysed were divided in different groups: hydroxyapatite, tricalciumphosphate and bioglass. The materials are characterized by the specific intensity curve measurements.

The HA products, with the exception of Algipore, seem to be monophasic. Ceros80 and Endobone were the only ones which seem to be totally crystallized. The TCP products Biobase and Cerasorb are nearly monophasic, whereas Ceros82 seems to contain a mixture of 30% HA and 70% beta-TCP. All TCPs show a high crystallization. The bioglasses did--as suspected--not show crystalline structures.

There are many possible causes for inhomogeneous crystallization of the investigated materials, as they are composites of different foreign ions, extremely small crystals or abnormal (deficient) apatites. How this affects the biological behaviour is not known.

We found differences between the examined materials; how this affects the biological behaviour is unknown. Further investigations are necessary to correlate the characteristics of the materials to the clinical outcome.