Experimental changes in mineral content of juvenile mouse femora

Juvenile laboratory mice were exposed to hypergravity (8 g), burrowing exercise, swimming to exhaustion, an anabolic steroid, and swimming and an anabolic steroid for 30 days to determine the variability of skeletal mineralization during growth. Changes in mineralization were correlated with changes in bending strength. Experimental mouse femora were loaded to failure in a cantilever beam configuration to determine bending strength, and ashed to determine total mineral content. Between experimental groups, mineral content ranged from 66.0 to 71.2% with the greatest change from the control being a 4.7% decrease in mineralization in the male swimming exercise group (P less than 0.001). Within two age-matched experiments, the first showed that the group with the greatest decrease in mineralization also had the greatest reduction in bending strength (P less than 0.001). The second age-matched experiment showed that the group with the greatest reduction in mineralization had bending strength greatly reduced (P less than 0.001). However, in this experiment, the weakest femora were in the anabolic steroid group that did not have the mineral content reduced. We conclude that (1) mineralization of juvenile mouse femora is extremely variable given varied conditions of exercise or loading; (2) mineralization of normal bone is decreased more often and to a greater extent than increased from normal exercise controls; (3) the decrease in mineralization seen here can decrease bending strength; and (4) the decrease in mineralization seen was not caused by a decrease in a mechanical loading but was probably due to a corticosterone-mediated psychological stress response.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)