Bone loss is associated with aging, but excessive bone loss is also the result of diseases like cancer and rheumatoid arthritis.
Western research has targeted a new way to look at this painful and debilitating condition - and help to stop the bone loss.
Stephen Sims, a researcher at Western University, and his team are looking to build better bones from the smallest components - the cells.
"Our area of research is bone cells...there are two major types of bone cells - there's the osteoblasts that creates new bone [and] the osteoclasts are the cells that destroy bone."
Of course we're aware of bone growth during childhood and adolescence, but our skeletons regenerate throughout our lives.
In fact our bones are replaced every 10 years, but diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and cancer can disrupt the balance involved in normal regrowth causing excessive bone loss.
"Some of the common cancers in humans - breast cancer, prostate cancer, some of the multiple myelomas - the cells migrate [or] metastasize from the initial tumours and then home to bone, for reasons that are not totally understood. That bone loss that is initiated by the tumours causes a lot of the pain and the disability that arises in the cancers," Sims says.
His research is zeroing in on enzymes that regulate how bone breakdown occurs.
"These are cells that arise from the bone marrow and that actually is the origin of osteoclasts...and we realize maybe some of these compounds would selectively act on osteoclasts...and we were able to show there was a selective effect of this compound to block osteoclast activity."
The hope is to complement therapies already being tested to target excessive bone loss.
"If the drug which is being tested for humans in B-cell lymphoma, a type of cancer, if there was an additional benefit of blocking the bone resorbtion then the patients are going to sort of benefit in two ways."
And that could possibly lead to new therapies within a few years.
