Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Cross - Section Study to Determine Human Height Using Femur Length in Zambian Population

2019; Volume: 2; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.31080/asmi.2019.02.0399

2581-3226

Chansa Mulenga,

Nutrition and Health in Aging

is an essential part of medico-legal and various social reasons [2,3].In mass disasters like explosions, railway and aircraft accidents identification is difficult by routine methods and only part of body that can help in identification of skeleton as at least a part of it will be available.Many studies have been conducted on the estimation of stature from various body parts like hands, trunk, intact vertebral column, upper and lower limbs, individual long and short bones, foot and footprints [3].Extensive works has been done on correlation of measurements of various body parts with stature of a person in Asia and many European countries [4].In contrast to most advanced countries, documented skeleton remains are not available in Africa for establishing the norms of stature reconstruction.Each race requires its own formula for estimation of stature since there lies variations in the length of limb bones relative to stature, race, sex, climate, heredity and nutritional status.Introduction: Height estimation from skeletal remains is a useful tool in forensic medicine and biological anthropology.In mass disasters like explosions, railway and aircraft accidents identification is difficult by routine methods and only part of body that can help in identification of skeleton as only a part of it will be available.In contrast to most advanced countries where extensive works has been done on correlation of measurements of various body parts, documented skeleton remains are not available in Africa for establishing the norms of stature reconstruction.Each race requires its own formula for estimation of stature since there lies variations in the length of limb bones relative to stature, race, sex, climate, heredity and nutritional status.Methodology: This thesis explores the estimation of a person's height by analysing the femur length in living subjects of medical students from the Copperbelt University Michael Chilufya Sata School of medicine, Copperbelt province of Ndola, Zambia from January 2018 to April 2018. Findings:The study included a total number of 100 medical students, males n=50 and females n=50.The mean femur length and height was 44.2cm and 171.6cm respectively for the males, while the mean femur length and height was 42.3cm and 166.5 cm respectively for females.The mean femur/height percentage for males 25.7% and that of females was 25.4%, this indicates that height of individuals is four times the femur.The mean femur length was 44.2cm and 42.3cm for males and females respectively, with positive correlation coefficients (r) of 0.5 and 0.64 for male and female femur, implying that males are likely to be taller than women as the femur length is directly proportional to the height. Conclusion:The height of a person is directly proportional to the femur length and is four times the femur length.Height estimation differs between males and females in that males are more likely to be taller than women as they have a longer femur length therefore the longer the femur the taller the person and vice versa and hence a different regression formula for height estimation each sex.