Comparative Study of Macro vs. Micro Test of Osteoporotic Rat Bones

Osteoporosis is a generalized systematic skeleton disease that is characterized by retrogression of the mechanical resistance of the bones. There is increasing demand for the evaluation of more bone parameters, so we have started to study the bone mechanical properties by the three-point bending test and nanoindentation. The experiments were performed on 16 rat femurs divided into two groups: I – baseline control, II – Alcohol administration. We evaluated the elastic modulus by both tests and we can conclude that there are no statistically significant differences amongst the means or medians of both three-point bending and nanoindentation tests resulting values at the 95.0% confidence level.