It’s a fact: wild gorillas do not develop osteoporosis as their human cousins.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine and their international colleagues found that in a study of skeletons of gorillas collected wild, the female gorillas did not suffer the same accelerated bone loss as humans do when they age. They say the findings could provide clues about how humans evolved to deal with age-related illnesses.
The study will be published in Philosophical Translations of Royal Society B on September 21, 2020.
Christopher Ruff, Ph.D. is professor at the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Natural selection does not favor bone loss that leads to fractures as we age. We can learn more about this condition by looking at the close relatives of humans in the evolutionary tree.
Source:
https://phys.org/news/2020-09-bones-wild-gorillas-dont-osteoporosis.html
