Dry-bone manifestations of rickets in infancy and early childhood

Abstract

Rickets and osteomalacia are the subadult and adult expressions of a disease in which the underlying problem is a failure to mineralize bone protein (osteoid). The most common cause of this disease is a physiological deficiency in vitamin D. The associated problems include deformed bones and this condition is well known in pre-modern medical texts and documents as a fairly common cause of morbidity. Given these facts, it is surprising that the literature on palaeopathology provides very little evidence of this disease in archaeological human skeletal samples. The medieval sample (N=687) of human remains from Wharram Percy, North Yorkshire, England contains a remarkable subsample of eight burials in which a spectrum of pathological features is expressed. The subsample includes infants ranging in age from 3 to 18 months at the time of death. Ten abnormal bone features were identified in the subsample, including: (i) cranial vault porosity; (ii) orbital roof porosity; (iii) deformation of the mandibular ramus; (iv) deformation of arm bones; (v) deformation of leg bones; (vi) flared costo-chondral ends of ribs; (vii) irregular and porous cortex of the costo-chondral ends of the ribs; (viii) abnormality of the growth plates of long bones; (ix) irregular and porous surfaces of the metaphyseal cortex; (x) thickening of the long bones, particularly in the metaphyseal areas. Not all of these features were found in all of the cases. Nevertheless, the overall pattern of skeletal abnormality fits well with the anatomical and radiological conditions associated with rickets. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.