Dental age assessment in children and teenagers with different craniofacial skeletal patterns

Introduction: dental development assessment may help in diagnosis of development disruptions and in orthodontic treatment planning. Disturbances of dental and craniofacial development share similar risk factors. In this way, dental development assessment may be a useful method to also predict skeletal malocclusion. Objective: This study investigated the relationship between dental development and skeletal patterns. Methods: patients of both genders, aged 7 to 16 years old, who presented cephalometric and panoramic radiographs before orthodontic treatment were included. Calibrated examiners blinded for sex and age defined the dental age by analyzing the radiographs using the Demirjian method (1973). ANB, SNA and SNB angles were obtained by cephalometric tracing. The dependent variable of the study was the subtraction of dental age (DA) by chronological age (CA) (DA-CA). The agreement between dental age and chronological age was determined by the Bland-Altman method. The relationship between CI-ID and skeletal patterns was analyzed by Spearman’s correlation tests and the Generalized Linear Model adjusted for age and sex. Results: 145 patients were included in the study and the Bland-Altman test showed agreement between dental and chronological ages. In the correlation test, no association was found between DA-CA and skeletal patterns (p>0.05). In the multivariate analysis adjusted for sex and age, it was also not found a significant association. Conclusion: our results suggest that there is no relationship between dental development and skeletal patterns.