A research paper penned by a team of researchers, one of whom is Dr Arthur Cortes, an Associate Professor at the UM's Faculty of Dental Surgery, was just published on Injury, one of the most prominent international scientific journals on Medical Traumatology.
The paper, titled “Age-related changes in the bone microstructure in patients with femoral neck fractures” shows how patients with femoral fractures experience bone alterations as they get older, such as less hydrogen ions in the bone matrix. These alterations, the risk of which progressively increases with age, were detected using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
For this study, a number of patients were analysed at the University of Malaga, Spain. Bone samples, which were retrieved from these patients during surgery, were analysed in the 14-Teslas Nuclear Magnetic Resonance device at Harvard University, USA, and these same samples were then sent to McGill University in Canada to undergo more laboratorial analyses. Researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada and the Complutense University of Madrid also participated in the analyses.
But while part of the study took place in Harvard University, which is where Dr Arthur Cortes did his postdoctoral studies, most of the analysis and data interpretation was made with a dedicated software at the University of Malta.
Dr Arthur Cortes, Associate Professor from the Faculty of Dental Surgery, told Newspoint that for an article to be published in such a medical journal, it needs to “have scientific and clinical relevance, which is offered through this study since it addresses relatively common bone conditions for elderly patients. This makes it also relevant for the Maltese community, who I will hope will benefit from it as well”.
Dr Cortes said he is proud to have contributed to this study which involved the collaboration of so many universities across the world for the common good.