Professor Belinda Beck

Because just adding more bone is not the way the body works.

It's a very efficient organism.

It doesn't add weight.

It optimizes the structure.

And that's what changing the shape of the thigh bone did.

Yeah.

If you think about a pipe.

because bones tend to be hollow.

So they've got an outer shell and it's hollow.

So the hollowness makes it light.

But the wider that pipe is, the stronger it is.

For the exact same amount of mass, the wider it is, the stronger it is.

And that's what we saw happen.

The femoral neck, the part that normally fractures in a hip fracture, got wider.

And the cortex itself got thicker and stronger, so more resistant to fracture if somebody was going to fall over on their head.

Yeah, it was good.

And I should also mention that obviously we focus on postmenopausal women because they are by far the biggest group of people who are affected.

But men do also get osteoporosis and they do still fracture and their outcomes are often worse.

So even though it's a small population, we still needed to test it.

So we also did the Lythmorphomen trial.