Summary--Measuring "bone quality".

The idea of bone quality is well-established in the literature and represents a real conundrum in the treatment of osteoporosis. On the one hand, there are measurements for patients that predict fracture risk for the population as a whole, but between individual patients, one will fracture but another will not, despite the fact that all of the technical measurements we use to predict fracture risk are the same. There are, of course, many aspects of bone mechanical properties that cannot yet be measured in patients. The session began with a discussion of what bone quality is, then the speakers presented work on novel aspects of bone properties that could help explain why fracture prediction in vivo is inexact.