Abstract: | A simple method for calculating the prevalence of disease in a past human population is described with particular reference to osteoarthritis. It can be applied to diseases other than osteoarthritis, and should prove particularly useful when studying the epidemiology of other diseases which affect numerous sites within the body and where the overall prevalence cannot be obtained simply by adding the prevalences of the individual sites, because more than one may be affected in the same skeleton. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |