Speaker A (McCall McPherson) explains bone turnover (also called bone remodeling) as a normal, lifelong process where osteocytes sense microdamage, osteoclasts resorb damaged bone, and osteoblasts build new bone — renewing the skeleton roughly every 7–10 years — and contrasts this ongoing process with bone density scans, which reflect past bone rather than future turnover.
Chapters
I want to actually explain bone turnover a little bit more, please, and why people, when you look at a bone density scan, it's really just showing you the past. Bone turnover is showing you the future bone turnover. You're also going to hear it called bone remodeling. And it's basically this process that happens throughout our lives. It's normal. You want it to happen. It's why you get a new skeleton every seven to 10 years. You have a couple different cells involved in this process of bone remodeling. You, you have these cells called osteoclasts that are doing up this damaged, weakened bone. And it's a coupled process. Then you have these cells called osteoblasts that are coming in and building stronger, healthier new bone. This is normal. So it's not to say that all bone breakdown or all bone resorption, that's another way to say that is bad. It's not. You need it, and you need it for this healthy remodeling process of cleaning out the damaged bone. Because what happens is, as we're all going about our daily lives, doing our daily activities, doing your chores around the house, or doing intense workout at the gym, you get these tiny little micro cracks and micro fractures in your bones. That's normal for every single person. And then you have cells within the bone, they're called osteocytes, sense that damage, and they send out a signal to these other cells. They're like orchestrators of this whole remodeling process. And then these osteoclasts come and scoop out that damaged bone, and the blasts come build stronger, healthier new bones. So we want this to happen.
