Rickets ran rife in children following the Industrial Revolution, but University of Otago-led research has found factory work and polluted cities aren’t entirely to blame for the period’s vitamin D deficiencies.
In a Marsden funded study, just published in PLOS One, researchers from Otago, Durham University, University of Edinburgh, University of Brighton, and University of Queensland, sampled teeth from a cemetery site in industrial era England, looking for microscopic markers of nutritional disease.
Lead author Dr Annie Sohler-Snoddy, Research Fellow in Otago’s Department of Anatomy, says they uncovered some of the first clear evidence of seasonal vitamin D deficiency in an archaeological sample.
She says it has been known for many years that there was an increase in rickets, a childhood bone disease caused by vitamin D deficiency, in 18th and 19th Century Europe.
“It has been…
