Today's understanding about bone aging.

Patient's age is an important factor in orthodontic treatment. There are many studies about bone aging from the aspects of osteoporosis and other bone diseases. Both, aging and osteoporosis are associated problems and have a great importance in relation to their incidence. But not only osteoporosis or other bone related diseases are issue for many studies, because the knowledge of bone pathophysiology and diagnostics with signaling molecules makes it possible to predict treatment outcome and specific cell targeted pharmacology. In recent years immunohistological studies had become very popular in all fields of medicine including orthodontics, too. The question we tried to answer in this literature mini-review was--what kind of immunohistological studies were done from the aspect of bone aging in relation to patient`s age and orthodontic treatment? Search on Cochrane Library, PubMed, Science Direct, and DynaMed data bases by keywords: Alveolar bone aging, RANK, RANKL, OPG, MMP-1, MMP-8, IL-1, IL-6, TNF-α, TNF-β, and BM, resulted with 147 full-text articles; from them 90 met the criteria, 30 were reviews, and only in 22 articles from 60 bone aging from the aspect of signaling molecules were discussed. Interestingly, only 2 articles (Cei 2006 and Zhang 2003) were related to alveolar bone, and none studied it from the orthodontic point of view. Patient`s age plays an important role in orthodontic treatment, because of the bone response to mechanical loading. It is in accordance to clinical studies, or alike, that tooth movement in younger patient occurs much faster than in adults, but the question which factors are responsible for the process still remains.