Let's do a quick overview of bone, calcium storage, and calcium levels in blood. So, I want you to think of bone as a bank. In banks, we're going to store money.
Well, in bone, we're going to store calcium. If you need to get money... You go to the bank and you pull it out.
So if your body needs calcium, we're going to go to your bone and we're going to take calcium from your bone and put it into your bloodstream. Now, if you have a lot of money, you're usually going to deposit it in a bank. Well, if you have a lot of calcium in your bloodstream, we need to deposit it into the bone. Now for us to deposit calcium into bone, as well as take calcium out from bone, we need cells that can do these actions for us.
So if we have too much calcium, we need to store the calcium into the bone. Now what cell can actually build bone for us? If you said osteoblast, you're right.
So when we have too much calcium in our blood, we need to store it into bone, and osteoblast will build new bone. So they're going to take the calcium from the blood, and they're going to deposit it into the bone. Now, if we have too little calcium in the blood, so we have low calcium levels, we need to pull calcium out of bone and put it into the blood.
Well, what cell can break down bone and It's reabsorbing calcium that was previously deposited and placing it into blood. If you said osteoclasts, you're correct. So basically, we're using a combination of osteoblasts and osteoclasts to help maintain our blood calcium levels. If we have too much calcium in our blood, Osteoblasts will help build new bone, will store the calcium in the bone. If we have too little calcium in the blood, osteoclasts will help break down bone, take the calcium from it, and place it into the bloodstream.
So your bone is kind of a buffer system for calcium levels in your blood. This is going to work continuously to help maintain blood calcium levels, however there are going to be other factors that contribute to calcium homeostasis.