Cancer Rates in Medieval Britain Ten Times Higher than Thought
Images: Left: Jenna Dittmar. Right: Bram Mulder
CT scanning used to uncover remnants of malignancy hidden inside medieval bones provides new insight into cancer prevalence in a pre-industrial world. Left: Excavated medieval bone from spine showing cancer metastases (white arrow). Right: CT scan of bone from a medieval skull showing metastasis hidden within (white arrow).
The first study to use x-rays and CT scans to detect evidence of cancer among the skeletal remains of a pre-industrial population suggests that between 9-14% of adults in medieval Britain had the disease at the time of their death.
This puts cancer prevalence in a time before exposure to tumour-inducing chemicals from industry and tobacco at around ten times higher than previously thought, according to researchers.
Prior research into historic cancer rates using the archaeological record has been limited to examining the bone exterior for lesions. It suggested that cancer was rare, affecting less than 1% of the population.
A team led by the University of Cambridge have now coupled visual inspection with radiological imaging to analyse 143 skeletons from six medieval cemeteries in and around the city of Cambridge, UK, dating from the 6th to the 16th century.
The findings of the study are published today in the journal Cancer.
“The majority of cancers form in soft tissue organs long since degraded in medieval remains. Only some cancer spreads to bone, and of these only a few are visible on its surface, so we searched within the bone for signs of malignancy,” said lead author Dr Piers Mitchell, who conducted the research as part of the ‘After the Plague’ project.
“Modern research shows a third to a half of people with soft tissue cancers will find the tumour spreads to their bones. We combined this data with evidence of bone metastasis from our study to estimate cancer rates for medieval Britain.”
“We think the total proportion of the medieval population that probably suffered with a cancer somewhere in their body was between nine and fourteen per cent,” said Mitchell, from Cambridge University’s Department of Archaeology.
“Using CT scans we were able to see cancer lesions hidden inside a bone that looked completely normal on the outside,” said study co-author and After the Plague researcher Dr Jenna Dittmar.
“Until now it was thought that the most significant causes of ill health in medieval people were infectious diseases such as dysentery and bubonic plague, along with malnutrition and injuries due to accidents or warfare.”
“We now have to add cancer as one of the major classes of disease that afflicted medieval people,” Dittmar said.
However, the researchers point out that in modern Britain some 40-50% of people have cancer by the time they die, making the disease 3-4 times more common today than the latest study suggests it was during medieval times.
They say that a variety of factors likely contribute to contemporary rates of the disease, such as the effects of tobacco, which began to be imported into Britain in the 16th century with the colonising of the Americas.
The researchers also point to the cancerous effects of pollutants that have become ubiquitous since the industrial revolution of the 18th century, as well as the possibility that DNA-damaging viruses are now more widespread with long-distance travel. Moreover, our longer lifespans give cancer much more time to develop.
The skeletal remains investigated for the latest study came from sites near three villages in the vicinity of Cambridge, as well as three cemeteries uncovered within the medieval centre of the university city, including the site of a former Augustinian friary, and the site of a former charitable hospital that cared for the sick and destitute (now part of St. John’s College).
Very few of the excavated remains were complete, so the team limited themselves to individuals with intact spinal column, pelvis and femora (thigh bones). Modern research shows these to be the bones most likely to contain secondary malignancies – or metastases – in people with cancer.
The remains of 96 men, 46 women, and an individual of unknown sex, had their vertebrae, femurs and pelvis inspected and then imaged using x-rays and CT scans. The team found signs of malignancy in the bones of five individuals – a minimum prevalence of 3.5%. These were mostly in the pelvis, although one middle-aged man had small lesions throughout his skeleton suggesting a form of blood cancer.
Research shows that CT scans detect bone metastases around 75% of the time, and only a third to half of cancer deaths involve spread to the bone, so the team projected that 9-14% of medieval Britons developed cancer.
However, they caution that the sample size is inevitably limited and diagnosing cancer in those lain dead for many centuries is somewhat challenging.
“We need further studies using CT scanning of apparently normal skeletons in different regions and time periods to see how common cancer was in key civilizations of the past,” added Mitchell.
See more here: beforeitsnews.com
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
itsme
| #
‘We need further studies using CT scanning of apparently normal skeletons in different regions’
yep, agree – if you are digging up medieval areas full of people that died of ‘something’ like – six medieval cemeteries, charitable hospitals and a friary of old friars living harsh lives…
you’re gonna find ‘something’ like cancer
Reply
Mark Tapley
| #
People of the Middle Ages of course did not eat a processed diet high in carbs. The weat at that time was much higher in protein than the Borelog wheat (ap 97%) grown today that has almost none. Since there was no modern food processing, the critical vitamin B17 that prevents cancer was no doubt more available in the general diet of the day. Groups of people today that get this substance in their daily diet rarely get cancer just like people that get sufficient vit. C don’t get scurvey.
The famous doctor Albert Shwietzer was in Africa for many years. He stated that of the many natives he examined with a variety of diseases and sometimes malnutrition he never found any evidence of cancer until he encountered some natives that had worked for a long time on a colonial plantation and had been eating a western diet (low in nutrients A, D, K, E, B17).
Bears are a good example. In the wild it is very rare that one has been killed and found to have cancer because their normal diet has no processed food and these omnivores get plenty of B17. When in captivity they very often die of cancer because they are fed processed junk devoid of B17. The native Inuit got B17 and vit. C from the animals they consumed since there were no carbohydrates.
Reply
Binra
| #
The Universal Biology/GNM of Hamer’s understanding of cancers as a process of ‘biologically expressed shocks’ indicates a completely different coherent view and response to cancer.
The current protected narrative for cancer is fear and attack based pathological thinking.
The process of the ‘cancer’ is then not a disease of broken genes or merely ‘spread’ by metastasis, but the expression of core psychic shock through evolutionary biological expression,
. The modern way of death is undermining the body’s capacity to simply function (heal) while we attack the healing phase of a biological shock expression or indeed a detoxification process – as the disease.
The relative absence of cancer in anything premodern is simple feedback to look at what has changed and re-evaluate it. When the modern developments are billion dollar industrial processing of life as food production, processing, medical procedure and toxic pharmacological interventions along with other environmental toxic exposure – all in a realm of chronically suppressed vitality for the sake of social compliance to engineered ‘normals’ what would you expect?
Reply
Binra
| #
I might add that for cherrypicking psuedo scientific PR – which readily finds copy and paste – the title and opening paragraphs are the sales pitch and meme-worm. So a more honest translation might be “Cancer Rates In Medieval Britain THOUGHT to be Ten Times Higher Than otherwise Thought”. One could put theorised or claimed or believed or considered instead of ‘thought’.
In a time of mind-control – responsibility for thought, word and resulting deed is paramount. The principle of science is an active alignment in self-honesty and relational feedback. If we don’t pick up on our own active ignorances or blind spots, we at least need give an ear and consideration to the responses we meet from others.
If there is a wish to propagate ‘news’ stories in this way, why not do so under a brief caution?
Buyer beware!
You may not realise you are being invited into a contractual exchange in which your mind can be replaced by the suggestions of another.
Reply