Histologic assessment of extraction sockets following tooth extraction: suitability of a rabbit model

This study was aimed at determining the suitability of rabbits for assessment of alveolar bone healing following tooth extraction. Methods: Six (6) adult female New Zealand rabbits were used for this study. They were acclimatized under stand ard laboratory conditions for two weeks before the commencement of the study. Tooth extraction wascarried out in all the rabbits and this was followed by histologic assessment of alveolar bone healing and osteocyte count at week 2 and week 4 post extraction. Results: All the rabbits tolerated the extraction procedure and no complication was recorded. Histo-architecture of alveolar bone was characterized by marked osteoblastic activity at week 2 post extraction and increased osteocyte presence at week 4 post extraction. Average value of osteocyte count (cells/µm2) was 20 ± 4.58 at week 2 post extraction and 32.33 ± 2.08 at week 4 post extraction. Conclusion: The result obtained from this study shows that the rabbit could well serve as an experimental anima l for assessment of alveolar bone healing following tooth extraction

Sex determination using humeral dimensions in a sample from KwaZulu-Natal: an osteometric study / 대한해부학회지

The morphological characteristics of the humeral bone has been investigated in recent times with studies showing varying degrees of sexual dimorphism. Osteologists and forensic scientists have shown that sex determination methods based on skeletal measurements are population specific, and these population-specific variations are present in many body dimensions. The present study aims to establish sex identification using osteometric standards for the humerus in a contemporary KwaZulu-Natal population. A total of 11 parameters were measured in a sample of n=211 humeri (males, 113; females, 98) from the osteological collection in the Discipline of Clinical Anatomy, Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. The difference in means for nearly all variables were found to be significantly higher in males compared to females (P<0.01) with the most effective single parameter for predicting sex being the vertical head diameter having an accuracy of 82.5%. Stepwise discriminant analysis increased the overall accuracy rate to 87.7% when all measurements were jointly applied. We conclude that the humerus is an important bone which can be reliably used for sex determination based on standard metric methods despite minor tribal or ancestral differences amongst an otherwise homogenous population.