Research master thesis | Archaeology (research) (MA/MSc)
open access
2024-01-31T00:00:00Z
Urbanization and urban living not only reshaped the social, cultural, political, and economical aspects of European societies, but also had a great impact on people’s health. These effects can be...Show moreUrbanization and urban living not only reshaped the social, cultural, political, and economical aspects of European societies, but also had a great impact on people’s health. These effects can be observed in the archaeological record through the analysis of skeletal remains from urban sites by comparing them to their rural counterparts. Although multiple studies have focused on investigating the effects of urbanization and urban living, few have researched the impact of urban living on infants, children, and maternal health. Therefore, this research focuses on assessing the effects of urban living in infant and maternal health during post medieval times in the Netherlands through the comparison of oral stress indicators from a rural (Middenbeemster) and an urban (Arnhem) collection of post-medieval Dutch non-adults and adults. To do so, frequencies and age-at-formation of linear enamel hypoplasia, as well as frequency of dental caries were recorded and analyzed for permanent and deciduous teeth, using age-categorical data to compare them between rural and urban individuals. The results from this research demonstrate that urban living had a negative impact on infant and maternal health, as found from the dental markers associated to the prenatal period. In addition, this research has shown that analyzing dental caries in deciduous teeth can demonstrate the maternal-infant relationship after birth, and that dental caries can be used as a proxy to determine frailty and resiliency of non-adult individuals.Show less
Frailty, an age-related decline in multiple physiological systems, increases risks to adverse health outcomes and mortality and is characterized by accelerated processes also seen in non...Show moreFrailty, an age-related decline in multiple physiological systems, increases risks to adverse health outcomes and mortality and is characterized by accelerated processes also seen in non-pathological ageing. According to neuroscientific models, a loss of sensorimotor stimulation due to degraded sensory input, and central processing deficits result in the development of maladaptive plasticity. To stop or reverse the underlying correlates of maladaptive plasticity, a tablet-based at-home sensorimotor training was administered to 48 frail German older adults. Pre-intervention, severity of frailty was assessed using the frailty phenotype framework as well as the Deficit Accumulation model. A reduced number of participants also had an MRI (n = 22) and fMRI (n = 18) scan done to assess regional gray matter volume and intra-network functional connectivity, respectively. Following randomization, the experimental group (n = 24) trained on unimodal and bimodal sensory discrimination tasks in the visual, auditory, and tactile domain. The control group (n = 24) engaged in an app-based relaxation training. After 60 days of training, both groups were reassessed on the above parameters. Results indicated that the sensorimotor intervention had a tendency towards an effect on frailty as assessed using the frailty phenotype model (p = .058). Furthermore, in the experimental group, gray matter volume decline in the precentral gyrus halted compared to the control condition (p = .007). As such, this result provides preliminary evidence that a neuroplasticity-oriented approach to targeting frailty could be of merit. This thesis underlines the importance of using longitudinal data to establish causality in the research on frailty and signposts the need to assess relationships between brain and frailty as an entity in its whole, beyond its subcomponents.Show less
