| Abstract: | Age has the ability to confound prevalence data. Yet, the effects of length of exposure and age‐structure on such prevalence data are seldom directly measured in osteological studies. Here we describe a simple method that addresses both issues through the use of person‐years, and treatment of data in the case of rare events as Poisson counts. We advocate use of person‐years as a denominator when comparing skeletal data that involves the cumulative insults of ageing (e.g. fractures, dental caries, and other chronic diseases such as osteoarthritis). Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
