Qualitative Testing of finger nail for Osteoporosis

[Abhinav Dey]

In India, Osteoporosis in women around the age of menopause often and in most of the case goes undiagnosed until the lady gets a bone fractured.

The idea was to take the nail samples of the patients and perform Raman spectroscopy (or other methods) on it to determine the amount of disulphide bonds present. How that would help is this concentration of disulphide bonds is directly proportional to the number of s-s bonds present in the bones, hence the bone mass density can be tested.

 

Link for the Raman Spectroscopy test: http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/preliminary-work-on-the-development-of-a-novel-detection-method-for-osteoporosis(419bb913-6a7c-4726-acbc-fc2de9afbd1c).html

I would like to have suggestions for ways to characterize the finger nail so that bone mass density is counted.