Correlación entre edad ósea, dental y cronológica en una muestra de niños españoles

Resumen

The knowledge of biologic age in children becomes important to set up a correct diagnosis and a treatment plan in orthodontic and paediatric dentistry. It’s essential for Legal and Forensic Medicine when we find unidentified people and we want to determine their possible chronological age. Several methods of age estimations have been tested and described in literature. Although bone age has been the parameter most commonly used in order to determinated the somatic maturation, some authors believe that the dental age offers lower range of variability. Objectives: to know the relationship between dental/bone age, bone/chronological age and dental/chronological age and to establish what age (dental or bone) is closer to chronological age. Materials and methods: 57 patients (35 girls and 22 boys) were studied with an overage age of 11,68 years old. A prior informed consent was signed by the parents before. A panoramic radiograph was taken on each child and using the Demirjian’s method we fix the dental age and therefore a radiograph of the left hand using the Greulich and Pyle Atlas to fix the bone age. Results: for the total sample we obtained an underestimation of both dental and bone age as compared with chronological age, being closer to the dental than the bone age. When we apply the Pearson statistical method Test for obtain correlations between the different ages, we found that there was a significant correlation between chronological and bone age being the closest correlation to the dental age. Conclusions: we considered that the dental age is the best one for approximates the chronological age although we think that will be convenient extent the investigation with a larger sample of patients in order to get more conclusive results