Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: City Living And Biological Frailty

虽然人口密度的增加和城市的发展往往被认为是社会和经济机会的重要来源，但城市化的潜在负面影响有时会损害人类健康。 在有生命的社会中，定居点和人口密度的增加可能伴随着更大的风险和对危险传染病的易感性，社会不平等，不卫生的生活条件和不稳定的食物供应。 古人口学;基于骨骼遗骸的考古学过去的人口研究-即使在没有书面历史记录的情况下，也可以为人们，他们的社会和物理环境以及他们的疾病之间的复杂关系提供重要的见解。 本项目将调查中世纪丹麦城市化对人类健康和死亡风险的影响。公元1050-1536年），以解开社会和生物对人类健康的影响，在不断变化的人口。 在古人口统计学中，“虚弱”被定义为个体的年龄调整死亡风险。 虚弱可能因个体对疾病和死亡的易感性差异而不同，这些差异可能有潜在的遗传，社会或环境原因。 对中世纪丹麦骨骼样本的新的统计分析将用于确定过去脆弱和死亡风险的变化模式如何因中世纪时期城市化的增加而有所不同。 该项目将向我们介绍城市化在过去工业化前人口中的作用，这些人口面临着继续影响今天人们的相同疾病和状况，因此将为如何避免新出现的健康风险提供见解。 这项研究的更广泛影响包括博物馆展览，公共科学外展工作，（特别是旨在促进妇女在科学研究中的作用），并继续国际合作。本论文项目汇集了建立古人口的方法和脆弱的新模型，沿着新开发的统计方法，从骨骼数据中调查儿童和成人虚弱与死亡风险之间的关系，以确定城市化对中世纪丹麦死亡年龄分布的影响。 将对来自Ole Wormsgrit城市墓地、Sejet农村教区墓地和Om Kloster修道院墓地的骷髅遗骸进行检查，这些遗骸代表了在丹麦日德兰半岛东海岸的中世纪港口城市Horsens及其附近地区居住的人的样本。 这些样本将被分析以确定：（1）在中世纪时期，由于城市化，虚弱和死亡年龄模式如何不同，（2）男性和女性如何受到三个样本内部和之间的社会和物理环境的不同影响，以及（3）童年虚弱与由此产生的成年虚弱和死亡率之间的关系。 这些目标将通过估计疾病流行率和与儿童压力、感染和营养不良的骨感指标相关的死亡风险来实现。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

While increased population density and the growth of cities are often thought to be important sources of social and economic opportunity, the potential negative effects of urbanization can sometimes harm human health. In living societies, increasing settlement and population density can be accompanied by greater exposure and susceptibility to dangerous infectious diseases, social inequality, unsanitary living conditions, and unstable food supplies. Paleodemography; the study of human populations in the archaeological past based on skeletal remains - can provide important insights into the complex relationships between people, their social and physical environments, and their diseases even in the absence of written historical records. This project will investigate the effects of urbanization on human health and the risk of death in medieval Denmark (c. AD 1050-1536) to disentangle the social and biological influences on human health in changing populations. In paleodemography, "frailty" is defined as an individual's age-adjusted risk of death. Frailty can vary owing to individual differences in susceptibility to disease and death that may have underlying genetic, social, or environmental causes. New statistical analyses of skeletal samples from medieval Denmark will be used to determine how patterns of variation in frailty and risk of death in the past differed as a result of increased urbanization during the medieval period. This project will inform us about the role of urbanization in past preindustrial populations that dealt with the same illnesses and conditions that continue to influence people today, and as such will provide insight into how to avoid emerging health risks. Broader impacts of this study include museum exhibitions, public science outreach efforts (particularly aimed at promoting the role of women in scientific research), and continued international collaborations.This dissertation project brings together established paleodemographic approaches and a new model of frailty, along with newly-developed statistical methods, to investigate the relationship between childhood and adult frailty and the risk of death from skeletal data in order to determine the effects of urbanization on age-at-death distributions from medieval Denmark. Skeletal remains from the Ole Wormsgade urban cemetery, Sejet rural parish cemetery, and the monastic cemetery of Om Kloster, which represent samples of the people who occupied the area in and near the medieval port city of Horsens on the eastern coast of Jutland, Denmark, will be examined. These samples will be analyzed to determine: (1) how frailty and age-at-death patterns differed as a result of urbanization over the medieval period, (2) how males and females were affected differently by their social and physical environments within and across the three samples, and (3) what the relationship was between childhood frailty and resulting adult frailty and mortality. These goals will be met by estimating disease prevalence and the associated risk of death in relation to boney indicators of childhood stress, infection, and malnutrition.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.