A determinant of bone architecture. The minimum effective strain.
Minimum effective strain (MES), a hypothesis since 1964, has achieved experimental support. The range is about 0.0008-0.002 unit bone surface strain. Strains below the MES apparently do not evoke adaptive architectural bone modeling, but those above it do. As a key property of living lamellar bone and its intermediary organization, MES offers the potential to predict exactly when and where mechanical loads will cause bone architectural adaptations. MES represents a step toward the goal of constructing a specific, predictive, and quantitative theory of the mechanical determinants of skeletal architecture.
D000818:Animals; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D001861:Bone Regeneration; D001842:Bone and Bones / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D013314:Stress, Mechanical