Summary:
The purpose of this essay is to underline the important role of Radiology and
clinical Radiologist with respect to the evaluation of bone strength in
children and adolescents on the basis of current bibliography. Evaluating bone
health with modern examination techniques becomes a complicated task when it
comes to growing pediatric skeleton. DXA method constitutes the most widely
used technique of assessing bone strength. Two-dimensional measurements are the
main disadvantage of this method, which becomes more intense in case of
studying a dynamically changing pediatric skeleton. VQCT and pQCT methods
provide three-dimensional measurements and assess pediatric skeleton in a more
"realistic" way. However, the increased exposure to ionizing radiation of vQCT
method, combined with limited availability and small reference databases have
hampered clinical use of these techniques. QUS method was introduced as a
promising technique, given that non-use of ionizing radiation could make it a
valuable tool in clinical practice. Nevertheless, some important limitations
are to be noted, the most important being the lack of pediatric reference
database. Finally, using MRI method in the assessment of pediatric skeleton is
under development in research area with the first data to be quite encouraging.
Keywords:
Children, Adolescents, Bone mineral density, Dual energy X-ray absorptiometry, Quantitative computed tomography
