Carmen Savin, Adriana Balan, Laura Vasilica-Gavrila,Alina Dumitroaia, Eugeniu Mihalaș, Ana Sîrghe
Abstract
The age of a person may be calculated taking into consideration her/his chronological age, biological, skeletal, dental, behavioural age, etc. The aim of the study was to evaluate the accuracy of the dental age estimation (Demirjian method) and of the skeletal maturation (Baccetti method) and to establish the possible correlations between chronological age, dental age and cervical vertebrae maturity. The present work is a retrospective study and was conducted by analysing randomly selected panoramic radiographs and lateral cephalograms of 88 children aged between 7 and 16 years. The data obtained were analysed using the SPPS 20.0 program. Measurement of the degree of association between maturity indexes of cervical vertebrae and dental age was done applying the Spearman correlation coefficient. It was observed a statistically significant association between cervical vertebrae maturity and the development of all evaluated teeth, in male patients. The maturity of the cervical vertebrae did not increased in accordance with chronological and dental age in male children. Introducing the interrelation between dental and skeletal maturity in pediatric dentistry and orthodontics could be of a real aid in diagnosis and treatment planning as well in identifying the ideal moment of establishing a multidisciplinary, complex treatment.