COMPARATIVE STUDIES REGARDING HEAVY ELEMENTS CONCENTRATION IN HUMAN CORTICAL BONE

Abstract

The heavy metal metabolism in the human hard tissues biostructures can be assessed by individual studies made on targeted groups from the same living area. During lifetime the exposure to the heavy metals due to environment and professional sources leads to their concentration increment at calcified tissues level, their study reflecting thaw the integrated or cumulative exposure. This study is conducted on 16 samples from human hard tissue in order to assess the metallic elemental concentration in bone and to find the influence of the human subject age on the results. Due to the fact that previous studies showed high differences in bones metals concentrations relative to the sex, living area and bone type we used in this study only male human bones, from the same area (Bucharest) and the same bone type (cortical). We supposed that this selection would allow us to assess the average value of the bone metal concentration function of age factor and similar with the natural concentration. Scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersion spectrometry method was chosen to assess the morphology of the studied bones and Ca/P ratio. X-ray fluorescence spectrometric method is proposed for the heavy elements analysis and its accuracy is proved using atomic absorption spectrometry, a well known precise method