Radiographs of the distal radius were obtained from the skeletal collection housed in the Department of Anatomy and Embryology at the University of Leiden. This is a series of dissecting room skeletons of documented sex and age at death. Only the results of the adult females were considered at this stage (n = 76). Age at death ranged from 33-96 years with a mean of 69 years.
Radiographs were standardised by maintaining a constant focal distance and all exposures taken at 90 KeV, 03 mA for 6 seconds. The entire process, from exposure to development, was undertaken by the same individual.
Radiographs were scanned in raster format using a Joyce-Loebl Chromoscan 3. This equipment 268 Proceedings of the Anatomical Society of can detect 255 gray levels and assigns a specific ASCII character to each group of four. To ease
interpretation ASCII characters were colour coded.
A constant pattern of relative densities was found. The areas of lowest relative density occurred around the periphery of the bone with the largest area being on the lateral aspect in the region of the styloid process. In contrast, the area of highest relative density, with the exclusion of the articular surface, occurred on the medial aspect of the bone. Proximal to the extremity relative density increased as compact bone was scanned. The most obvious change in relation to increasing age was a reduction in relative bone density predominantly on the medial aspect of the bone. The amount of bone loss was found to vary
considerably between individuals of the same age decade.
The implications of this new approach to the mapping of bone loss was discussed.