The IRCCS Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli in Bologna, Italy has started recruitment of patients for two clinical studies. And the Italian OI organization As.It.OI (Associazione Italiana Osteogenesi Imperfetta Onlus) is helping with recruitment.

The first 4Frailty project “Intelligent sensors, infrastructures and management models for the safety of fragile patients” – involves the use of an advanced movement analysis system (‘gait analysis’) in people with OI. Gait analysis is used to measure the kinetic and kinematic characteristics of body movement during walking or other simple exercises of daily life (such as getting up from a chair, climbing a step, etc.).

The second project is open to all patients affected by rare skeletal conditions and includes bone evaluation using High Resolution peripheral Quantitative Computed Tomography (HR-pQCT) – a tool to evaluate both qualitative and quantitative variations of the bone. The objective of this project is to compare dual energy X-ray bone densitometry (DXA) with HR-pQCT.