Comparative analysis between dental, skeletal and chronological age

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine if skeletal age, dental age and chronological age agreed in 41 subjects. The orthodontist not only needs to know the patient’s chronological age, but also he must know what percentage of growth can be expected in one or two years treatment time. This information is obtained by assessing the skeletal age with hand-wrist radiographs, but there are other aids of diagnosis such as the panoramic X-ray on which dental age can be assessed, so that the clinician has two aids for a more comprehensive diagnosis. Unfortunately although these methods are widely commented in Literature in the clinical practice they are not considered that much. In order to evaluate the skeletal age, we used Fishman’s method in the hand-wrist radiograph and to assess dental age, Dermirjian’s method in the panoramic X-ray was used. t test was used to determine the significant differences between the variables and it was applied to a test of analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results suggest exist statistically significant differences between the skeletal age and the dental age, between the dental age and the chronological age, as well as between the skeletal age and the chronological age. In correlation terms it is only observed very little correlation between the chronological age and the dental age.Key words: Dental age, skeletal age, chronological age, biological maturity.