RESEARCH ARTICLE Frail or hale: Skeletal frailty indices in Medieval London skeletons Kathryn E. Marklein1*, Douglas E. Crews1,2 1 Department of Anthropology, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States of America, 2 College of Public Health, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States of America *
[email protected] Abstract a1111111111 a1111111111 To broaden bioarchaeological applicability of skeletal frailty indices (SFIs) and increase a1111111111 sample size, we propose indices with fewer biomarkers (2±11 non-metric biomarkers) and a1111111111 a1111111111 compare these reduced biomarker SFIs to the original metric/non-metric 13-biomarker SFI. From the 2-11-biomarker SFIs, we choose the index with the fewest biomarkers (6- biomarker SFI), which still maintains the statistical robusticity of a 13-biomarker SFI, and apply this index to the same Medieval monastic and nonmonastic populations, albeit with an increased sample size. For this increased monastic and nonmonastic sample, we also pro- OPEN ACCESS pose and implement a 4-biomarker SFI, comprised of biomarkers from each of four stressor Citation: Marklein KE, Crews DE (2017) Frail or categories, and compare these SFI distributions with those of the non-metric biomarker hale: Skeletal frailty indices in Medieval London skeletons. PLoS ONE 12(5): e0176025. https://doi. SFIs. From the Museum of London WORD database, we tabulate multiple SFIs (2- to 13- org/10.1371/journal.pone.0176025 biomarkers) for Medieval monastic and nonmonastic samples (N = 134). We evaluate asso- Editor: Luca Bondioli, Museo delle Civiltà, ITALY ciations between these ten non-metric SFIs and the 13-biomarker SFI using Spearman's correlation coefficients.