Model for Bone Strength and Osteoporotic Fractures

Abstract
Inner porous regions play a critical role in the load bearing capability of large bones. We show that an extension of disordered elastic networks [Chung et al., Phys. Rev. B 54, 15 094 (1996)] exhibits analogs of several known mechanical features of bone. The “stress backbones” and histograms of stress distributions for healthy and weak networks are shown to be qualitatively different. A hereto untested relationship between bone density and bone strength is presented.