osteo-malacia

Noun

osteomalacia (countable and uncountable, plural osteomalacias)

1. A softening of adult bones due to inadequate mineralization; the adult equivalent of rickets.
   • In some skeletons from a 19th-century hospital site in The Netherlands, macroscopic changes suggestive of osteomalacia were present, but firm diagnosis required microscopic study of a bone sample to verify defective mineralization at the microstructural level.2023, Simon Mays, “The Macroscopic Study of Human Skeletal Paleopathology” (chapter 2), in The Routledge Handbook of Paleopathology, Routledge, →DOI, →ISBN, page 27