Percent osteonal bone versus osteon counts: The variable of choice for estimating age at death
✍ Scribed by Sam D. Stout; Sarah C. Stanley
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1991
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 362 KB
- Volume
- 86
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0002-9483
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Ahlqvist and Damsten's (1969) modification of the Kerley (1965) method for histological age estimation uses percent osteonal bone, rather than actual osteon counts, in order to eliminate the difficulty of distinguishing between intact and fragmentary osteons. Since their method has been developed for the femur only, and several more recent methods have been proposed that utilize percent osteonal bone, a study was undertaken to ascertain the relative value of percent osteonal bone compared with osteon counts to estimate age at death for the radius, tibia, and fibula.
First the question of how much of the cross-section of a bone should be sampled was addressed by comparing the results of regression against age for percent osteonal bone derived from sampling only four fields with those derived from the entire cross-section of the radius. A significant age association was found only when the entire cross-section was sampled.
In order to evaluate the relative merit of using either percent osteonal bone,