Nutritional Implications in 19th Century Portugal: A LEH Study - Hale - 2016

Linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) has been frequently used to infer general health conditions in past populations. This study documents LEH presence to infer and compare the quality of life between temporally similar rural and urban populations from late 19th – early 20th century Portugal. Data were collected from the Coimbra identified collection and the new Lisbon collection. Prevalence of LEH was documented by counting the frequency of LEH in each tooth class. Measurements of each hypoplasia were taken to calculate the percentage of enamel affected as a total hypoplastic area variable for each tooth. The frequency comparison for central incisors (p-value = 0.001) suggests there is a significant difference between the groups. The sample comparison using total hypoplastic area (p-value = <0.0001) also indicates there is a significant difference between the two populations. For both frequency and hypoplastic area methods, there were no significant sex differences found within and between each sample. However, age differences were detected for the central incisor and canine in both groups. MANCOVA was used to assess the differences in both methods used and found significant population differences between Lisbon and Coimbra (Wilk’s Lambda = 0.0047, 0.0023), respectively. These results support previous studies that the total hypoplastic area method may not be a more sensitive parameter than frequency alone. Concomitantly, a bias was found in the distribution of LEH within each tooth that may indicate the width differences may be due to the developmental nature of the enamel matrix and not indicative of the distribution of stress episodes. The results of this study illustrate the need to detect more sensitive parameters employed in future LEH studies.

Keywords

Enamel hypoplasia – Health ‒ Population density

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