Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
Harvard Department of the Classics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Apr 26;13(4):e0196448. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0196448. eCollection 2018.
Study of disease in the past can help illuminate patterns of human health, disease, and aging in the present. As average human life expectancy and incidence of chronic disease have increased in the last century, efforts to understand this epidemiologic shift have led to more investigation of healthy aging. Using osteological and radiological methods of analysis, this study examined 212 mostly nineteenth century adult skeletons from the crypt of St. Bride's in London, in order to investigate the relationship between age-at-death, sex, and number of lesions observed in bone. Lesions were classified into macro-level categories according to the Rapid Method for Recording Human Skeletal Data, and the correlation between age group and number of lesions in each category, as well as the total number of lesions, were analyzed. Correlations between age-at-death and the number and type of lesions were compared across both methods of analysis. A greater total number of lesions and a greater number of types of lesions was observed for the osteologically analyzed data, compared to the radiologically analyzed data. Correlations between age-at-death and specific pathology groups were in general weak, though stronger for the osteologically analyzed data. For each method of analysis, there were statistically significant differences between the total number of lesions and age group, with total number of lesions increasing with age, regardless of method of analysis. Joint and metabolic lesions were the most significant predictors of age-at-death. The correlations between total lesions observed and age-at-death were similar for radiologically and osteologically analyzed data, for the same set of bones. This suggests that, for the bones analyzed, while the number of lesions recorded differed according to method of analysis, the relationship between overall observed lesion burden and age-at-death was similar for both osteological and radiological analysis.
对过去疾病的研究可以帮助阐明人类健康、疾病和衰老的模式。在上个世纪，人类的平均预期寿命和慢性病发病率增加，为了理解这种流行病学转变，人们对健康老龄化的研究越来越多。本研究使用骨骼的骨骼学和影像学分析方法，研究了伦敦圣布赖德教堂地下室的 212 具主要来自 19 世纪的成人骨骼，以研究死亡年龄、性别和骨骼中观察到的病变数量之间的关系。根据人类骨骼数据快速记录方法对病变进行了宏观分类，并分析了每个分类中年龄组与病变数量以及总病变数量之间的相关性。比较了两种分析方法中死亡年龄与病变数量和类型之间的相关性。与影像学分析数据相比，骨骼学分析数据中观察到的总病变数量和病变类型更多。与死亡年龄相关的特定病理学组之间的相关性总体较弱，但骨骼学分析数据的相关性较强。对于每种分析方法，总病变数量与年龄组之间存在统计学差异，无论分析方法如何，总病变数量都随年龄的增长而增加。关节和代谢病变是死亡年龄的最重要预测因子。无论分析方法如何，观察到的总病变数量与死亡年龄之间的相关性相似。对于相同的骨骼集，骨骼学和影像学分析数据中观察到的总病变数量与死亡年龄之间的相关性相似。这表明，对于分析的骨骼，尽管根据分析方法记录的病变数量不同，但骨骼学和影像学分析中观察到的整体病变负担与死亡年龄之间的关系相似。
