Dental & Oral Health

Since, orthodontists established a strong correlation between tooth developmental stages and skeletal maturational stages; they tried to determine whether dental age assessment is favored over skeletal age maturity assessment. Moreover, they raised many questions to investigate which one of these two methods can be considered a better reliable procedure to predict the future growth potential for conducting appropriate timing for orthodontic intervention, plan proper orthodontic treatment and gain more successful results. Multiple methods were established in the literature to assess dental age, as well as, skeletal age. However, the selected methods in this study were panoramic radiographs and cephalometric radiography, respectively. Previous studies found a strong correlation between third molar development and canine calcification stages in relation to skeletal maturity which was investigated in the literature separately; while others suggested a weak correlation between both with respect to racial dissimilarity. Based on those findings, our present study was aimed to evaluate the validity of dental maturational stages of both canines and third molars, simultaneously, to determine the skeletal maturity, using Nolla’s and Demirjian’s which considered the most valid and easiest methods in estimating the dental age from panoramic radiographs in comparison with skeletal age maturation stages using cervical vertebrae maturational (CVM) method developed by Baccetti and coworkers from cephalometric radiography. Furthermore, to test the accuracy of dental age in estimating skeletal age and whether the dental age can be used as a sole method in determining growth spurt period for planning orthodontic, orthognathic treatment and teeth transplantation for Saudi population.