Estimating age of mature adults from the degeneration of the sternal end of the clavicle

Abstract

The sternal end of the clavicle has been illustrated to be useful in aging young adults, however, no studies have investigated what age-related changes occur to the sternal end post epiphyseal fusion. In this study, three morphological features (i.e., surface topography, porosity, and osteophyte formation) were examined and scored using 564 clavicles of individuals of European ancestry (n = 318 males; n = 246 females), with known ages of 40+ years, from four documented skeletal collections: Hamann-Todd, Pretoria, St. Bride's, and Coimbra. An ordinal scoring method was developed for each of the three traits. Surface topography showed the strongest correlation with age, and composite scores (formed by summing the three separate trait scores) indicated progressive degeneration of the surface with increasing chronological age. Linear regression analyses were performed on the trait scores to produce pooled-sample age estimation equations. Blind tests of the composite score method and regression formulae on 56 individuals, aged 40+ years, from Christ Church Spitalfields, suggest accuracies of 96.4% for both methods.These preliminary results display the first evidence of the utility of the sternal end of the clavicle in aging older adult individuals. However, in the current format, these criteria should only be applied to individuals already identified as over 40 years in order to refine the age ranges used for advanced age. These findings do suggest the sternal end of the clavicle has potential to aid age estimates beyond the traditional “mature adult” age category (i.e., 46+ years), and provides several suggestions for future research. Am J Phys Anthropol 156:203–214, 2015. © 2014 The Authors American Journal of Physical Anthropology Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Validation of the Acetabulum As a Skeletal Indicator of Age at Death in Modern European‐Americans,

“…For the purposes of age estimation, this dichotomous distinction may be meaningless. Both metamorphic and degenerative skeletal changes are age correlated, and both should be incorporated into skeletal age‐estimation methods . A potential venue for this incorporation might be the multifactorial Bayesian age‐estimation methods that are currently gaining support among forensic anthropologists .…”

Morphometry of Isan-Thai Clavicles as a Guide for Sex Determination

“…In addition, the appearance of rhomboid fossa on inferior clavicular surface could be used to distinguish the males from the females (Jit & Kaur, 1986;Rogers et al, 2000;Prado et al, 2009). Moreover, the medial articular surface of clavicle could be used to estimate age of Europeans (Kreitner et al, 1998;Falys & Prangle, 2015). In Thailand, there was only a report investigated about the age estimation based on length measurements by using computed tomography (CT) images of clavicles in NorthThais (Pattamapaspong et al, 2015).…”

Multivariate cumulative probit for age estimation using ordinal categorical data

“…As mentioned previously, this method has been in use since at least the 1950s (McKern & Stewart, 1957) and it continues to be used today (Falys & Prangle, 2015). In the dental age estimation literature it is not unusual to find studies that give the distributions of age (or summary statistics for these distributions) conditioned on stage (Mitchell et al, 2009;Peiris et al, 2009;Roberts et al, 2008).…”

“…The simplest of these methods simply sums the ordinal scores represented as integers across the traits (Buckberry & Chamberlain, 2002;Falys & Prangle, 2015;Gilbert & McKern, 1973;McKern & Stewart, 1957;Meindl & Lovejoy, 1985). This approach is problematic on a number of grounds, not least of which is that the scaling of each trait with respect to the remaining traits is not considered.…”