The use of the supero-inferior femoral neck diameter as a sex assessor

Abstract

The present study examines the sexing potential of the minimum supero-inferior femoral neck diameter in Caucasians and African-Americans who lived at the turn of the century. A Student's t-test and an ANOVA indicate that population differences in neck morphology exist, albeit the strength of the test is fairly weak (P = 0.015). Predictive models were developed using a linear discriminant function analysis for the African-American sample, the Caucasian sample, and the combined African-American and Caucasian (AAC) sample. Jackknifed classification matrices produced classification success rates ranging from 87 to 92%. Each of the three discriminant functions were evaluated using an independent, random holdout sample. Although a smaller holdout sample usually better approximates the true error involved in an application, this was clearly not the case in this study. For African-Americans, 28 of 28 individuals were correctly classified, for Caucasians 24 of 25, and for the combined AAC sample 53 of 53 individuals were sexed correctly. It is more likely that the true accuracy of the model for the population approximates 90%. This accuracy combined with the high rate of preservation of the femoral neck makes this measurement useful in extremely fragmentary samples.

A method for sex estimation using the proximal femur

“…Results indicate that FNAL and FNW were executed within proper levels of measurement error, being thus repeatable and reproducible. The LR models fitting are epitomized in Table 4 Seidemann et al [14] developed predictive models for the estimation of sex using and FNW] when applied to a different sample.…”

“…This measurement is occasionally mentioned in the biomedical literature as hip axis length [18]. FNW, also known as the supero-inferior femoral neck diameter, was typified as the narrowest distance across the femoral neck, perpendicular to the neck axis [14,18] (Figure 1). All measurements were taken on the left femur with a digital caliper.…”

“…The head diameter is probably the single best femoral measurement for the attribution of sex [7], but previous studies have also demonstrated the capacity of other proximal femur dimensions, such as the femoral neck axis length (FNAL) or the femoral neck width (FNW), for sex [14][15][16] and ancestry attribution [15,17]. Some geometric parameters of the proximal femur are associated with the risk of hip fractures [18][19][20], and sex differences in FNAL and FNW have long been noted in epidemiological studies [18][19][20][21][22].…”

“…Another objective is to test the cross-sample reliability of the new sexing technique by evaluating the models in another Portuguese identified skeletal sample. The performance of the technique is also compared with the ones developed by Seidemann et al [14] and Meeseun and colleagues [15], who also use proximal femur dimensions (FNW and FNAL, respectively) for sex estimation.…”

Accuracy and reliability of Southern European standards for the tibia: a test of two Mediterranean populations

“…Amongst the long bones, femur and tibia stand out due to their robusticity and thus, increased probability of survival during the recovery processes [11]. Another characteristic of these skeletal elements is that their particular anatomy allows for the recognition of specific bone areas even when fragmented which makes them advantageous for the development of sex estimation methods [16][17][18][19][20].…”