Strontium depth distribution in human bone measured by micro-PIXE

Strontium is naturally present in human bone, where it may exert beneficial or detrimental health effects depending on its concentration. The way strontium influences bone health and the concentrations at which the beneficial/detrimental health effects of strontium become important are still unknown, due partly to the difficulty of assessing the bone strontium concentration in vivo non-invasively. An x-ray fluorescence (XRF) system was developed, which is capable of measuring normal bone strontium levels in vivo non-invasively and therefore has the potential of becoming an important tool to understand bone strontium health effects. This technique, however, has the limitation that it relies on assumptions about bone strontium distribution to obtain a quantitative strontium measurement. To understand, to which degree, if any, the bone strontium distribution in bone changes from person to person, the bone strontium depth distribution was explored using micro-PIXE in five ex vivo cadaver fingers, taken from normal people exposed to strontium only through diet. We found that, in the measured samples, strontium was uniformly distributed across the cortical and trabecular bone, and therefore corrections do not need to be applied to in vivo strontium XRF data to correct for strontium depth distribution. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.