Estrogen depletion and drug treatment alter the microstructure of type I collagen in bone.

The impact of estrogen depletion and drug treatment on type I collagen fibril nanomorphology and collagen fibril packing (microstructure) was evaluated by atomic force microscopy (AFM) using an ovariectomized (OVX) rabbit model of estrogen deficiency induced bone loss. Nine month-old New Zealand white female rabbits were treated as follows: sham-operated (Sham;  = 11), OVX + vehicle (OVX + Veh;  = 12), OVX + alendronate (ALN, 600 μg/kg/wk., s.c.;  = 12), and OVX + cathepsin-K inhibitor L-235 (CatKI, 10 mg/kg, daily, p.o.;  = 13) in prevention mode for 27 weeks. Samples from the cortical femur and trabecular lumbar vertebrae were polished, demineralized, and imaged using AFM. Auto-correlation of image patches was used to generate a vector field for each image that mathematically approximated the collagen fibril alignment. This vector field was used to compute an information-theoretic entropy that was employed as a quantitative fibril alignment parameter (FAP) to allow image-to-image and sample-to-sample comparison. For all samples, no change was observed in the average FAP values; however significant differences in the distribution of FAP values were observed. In particular, OVX + Veh lumbar vertebrae samples contained a tail of lower FAP values representing regions of greater fibril alignment. OVX + ALN treatment resulted in a FAP distribution with a tail indicating greater alignment for cortical femur and less alignment for trabecular lumbar vertebrae. OVX + CatKI treatment gave a distribution of FAP values with a tail indicating less alignment for cortical femur and no change for trabecular lumbar vertebrae. Fibril alignment was also evaluated by considering when a fibril was part of discrete bundles or sheets (classified as ) or not (classified as ). For this analysis, the percentage of fibrils in cortical femur for the OVX group was 17% lower than the Sham group. OVX + ALN treatment partially prevented the proportion of fibrils from decreasing and OVX + CatKI treatment completely prevented a change. In trabecular lumbar vertebrae, there was no difference in the percentage of fibrils between Sham and any of the other treatment groups.