![]() ![]() ![]() “Daniel Whistler, an English physician, is credited with the earliest description of rickets, when in 1645, he published a monograph titled “Inaugural medical disputation on the disease of English children which is popularly termed the rickets”. Breast milk is a poor source of vitamin D and dark-skinned infants are at risk for rickets if they are exclusively breastfed beyond 6 months without vitamin D supplementation. Individuals with dark skin pigmentation who reside in northern latitudes or those with poor sun exposure are most at risk. “Rickets, although rare, is still diagnosed in the United States. Overall, the rate of rickets in children was 5.7 percent and residual rickets was seen in the remains of 3.2 percent of adults.”ĭr Kumaravel Rajakumar writes in the journal Pediatrics about the medical evolution rickets, how its links to vitamin D were discovered, and how cod liver oil because its first effective cure. The researchers found evidence of rickets in more than one in 20 ancient children. To find out just how prevalent the disease was, researchers from Historic England and McMaster University in Canada studied 2,787 skeletons from across the Roman Empire, dating from the first to sixth centuries A.D. “Roman physician Soranus was one of the first to remark upon “bony deformities” in infants in the first and second century. Their bones become soft and weak, leading to stunted growth and deformities like bowed legs.” While rickets is most often associated with Industrial cities in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries, new archaeological research shows it to have been a public health problem as early as the Roman empire. When children don’t get enough vitamin D, they wind up with rickets. It helps the gastrointestinal tract absorb calcium and phosphorous, which in turn ensures the normal mineralization of bones. According to the Smithsonian magazine, “Vitamin D, which is made in the body when the skin is exposed to sunlight, is vital to human health. ![]()
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