The role of parathyroid hormone in bone healing.

Animal fracture models have been extensively applied to pre-clinical research as a platform to identify and characterize normal and abnormal physiological processes and develop specific maneuvers that alter the biology and biomechanics being examined. The choice of animal model employed in a study bears a direct relationship to the specific intervention being analyzed. The animal models employed should be described clearly, control group data should be established and reproducibility should be defined from experiment to experiment and from institution to institution so that quantitative and qualitative outcomes can be reliably compared and contrasted to other related studies.