Cranial vault trauma and selective mortality in medieval to early modern Denmark.

To date, no estimates of the long-term effect of cranial vault fractures on the risk of dying have been generated from historical or prehistoric skeletons. Excess mortality provides a perspective on the efficacy of modern treatment, as well as the human cost of cranial injuries largely related to interpersonal violence in past populations. Three medieval to early modern Danish skeletal samples are used to estimate the effect of selective mortality on males with cranial vault injuries who survived long enough for bones to heal. The risk of dying for these men was 6.2 times higher than it was for their uninjured counterparts, estimated through a simulation study based on skeletal observations. That is about twice the increased risk of dying experienced by modern people with traumatic brain injuries. The mortality data indicate the initial trauma was probably often accompanied by brain injury. Although the latter cannot be directly observed in skeletal remains, it can be inferred through the relative risks of dying. The ability to identify the effects of selective mortality in this skeletal sample indicates it must be taken into account in paleopathological research. The problem is analogous to extrapolating from death register data to modern communities, so epidemiological studies based on mortality data have the same inherent possibility of biases as analyses of ancient skeletons.

Basics in paleodemography: a comparison of age indicators applied to the early medieval skeletal sample of Lauchheim.

Recent advances in the methods of skeletal age estimation have rekindled interest in their applicability to paleodemography. The current study contributes to the discussion by applying several long established as well as recently developed or refined aging methods to a subsample of 121 adult skeletons from the early medieval cemetery of Lauchheim. The skeletal remains were analyzed by 13 independent observers using a variety of aging techniques (complex method and other multimethod approaches, Transition Analysis, cranial suture closure, auricular surface method, osteon density method, tooth root translucency measurement, and tooth cementum annulation counting). The age ranges and mean age estimations were compared and results indicate that all methods showed smaller age ranges for the younger individuals, but broader age ranges for the older age groups.

Selective mortality in middle-aged American women with Diffuse Idiopathic Skeletal Hyperostosis (DISH).

OBJECTIVE: A mortality sample of white American male and female skeletons was examined to illustrate a simple means of identifying skeletal conditions associated with an increased risk of dying relatively early in adulthood and to determine if males and females with Diffuse Idiopathic Skeletal Hyperostosis (DISH) displayed the same general age-specific pattern of mortality. METHODS: Age-specific probability distributions for DISH were generated from 416 white Americans who died from the 1980s to the present, and whose remains were donated to the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center. The age-specific frequency of DISH is analyzed using an empirical smoothing algorithm. Doing so allows for the identification of deviations (i.e., local maxima) from monotonically increasing age-specific probabilities. RESULTS: In females (N = 199), there is a peak in the frequency of individuals with DISH around 60 years of age where 37.0% of the individuals have DISH. It is matched only by the frequency (38.7%) in the oldest females, those over 85 years old. In contrast, DISH frequencies for males (N = 217) increase monotonically with advancing age, reaching 62.5% in the ≥86 years age group. There was an association between DISH and high body weight in women, particularly those who died before they reached the age of 75. CONCLUSIONS: Early-onset DISH in white American women is associated with an increased risk of dying indicated by a local maximum in the probability curve. Should this finding be replicated in additional mortality samples and the reason DISH is associated with early death is established, beyond being heavy, this radiologically visible ossification of the spine could be a potential component of health-monitoring programs for middle-aged women.

Schleswig: medieval leprosy on the boundary between Germany and Denmark.

Leprosy was a well-recognized and dreaded disease in medieval Europe. The disease is reported to have reached Germany with the Roman invasion and it was present in Scandinavia in the first centuries AD. This paper estimates and analyzes the frequency of leprosy among adult people buried in one of five medieval cemeteries in the city of Schleswig. Seven different dichotomous osteological lesions indicative of leprosy were analyzed, and it was possible to score at least one of these conditions on 350 adult skeletons (aged 15 or older). The scores were transformed to a statistic indicating the likelihood that the person to whom the skeleton belonged suffered from leprosy. It was found that the frequency of leprosy in the five cemeteries varied between 9 and 44%. Four of the five cemeteries showed frequencies ranging from 35 and 44% and with no statistically significant differences among them. The fifth cemetery showed a significantly lower frequency of leprosy (9%). The distribution of female age at death does not appear to be affected by leprosy status. This means that females experienced a considerably elevated risk of dying once they had contracted leprosy as the disease usually has a mid-adulthood age of onset. In four of the five cemeteries males with leprosy died in higher ages than men without leprosy--in two of the cemeteries the difference was statistically significant. This indicates that leprosy usually added less to the risk of dying among men than among women in medieval Schleswig.