June 2013: Talks about BoneXpert at ICCBH and ESPE

At the International Conference on Children’s Bone Health (ICCBH) June 22-25, Thodberg will present a study of the secular trend of the Bone Health Index (BHI), and at the ESPE conference Sep 19-22, Dr. David Martin will present a new model for predicting adult height of black children.

The talk at ICCBH in Rotterdam, entitled “Bone Health Index: Swiss children have less in the bank than a generation ago”, exploits the unique opportunity in using hand X-rays to compare the bone health in two generations of Swiss children, one born in 1955 and the other on average 29 years later. While the adult height and the speed of maturation show no secular trend, BHI is found to decrease by 1.5%.

The talk at the ESPE meeting in Milan (European Society of Pediatric Endocrinology), entitled “At last, an adult height prediction model for black children”, presents an analysis of the birth-to-twenty study in Johannesburg, a longitudinal study of black and white children (aka the Mandela children). The BoneXpert Caucasian AHP model is applied and found to describe the white children well, but not the black, and a modified model is therefore presented.