Orthodontic treatment outcome: the relationship between anterior dental relations and anterior inter-arch tooth size discrepancy.

OBJECTIVE

This study investigated the pre- (T1) and post-treatment (T2) relationship between anterior (canine to canine inclusive) inter-arch tooth size ratio and various dental and skeletal variables.

DESIGN

Retrospective longitudinal clinical study.

SETTING

Swedish Health Board Clinic 2000.

SUBJECTS

Random selection of T1 and T2 orthodontic records of 137 Swedish patients (56 male and 81 female). The sample included non-extraction (77), and four premolar extraction (60) cases across a range of dental and skeletal malrelationships.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Dental cast and lateral cephalogram measurements were recorded. Exploratory modelling investigated whether a significant relationship existed between the anterior inter-arch tooth size ratio and these measurements.

RESULTS

Data was normally distributed with no statistically significant differences between males and females (P = 0.88) and extraction and non-extraction (P = 0.52) treatment modalities with respect to the anterior ratio. T1 bivariate regression analysis failed to show a relationship (p < 0.05) between variables. T2 bivariate analysis showed a statistically significant relation between three variables and anterior tooth size ratio. Multiple regression analysis led to a final model where maxillary inter-canine width (P = 0.002) and upper arch crowding (0.001) were statistically significantly related to the anterior inter-arch ratio. The coefficient of determination was however uniformly low (R(2) < 0.2) for all variables.

CONCLUSION

The anterior inter-arch tooth size ratio was not associated with any common pre- or post-treatment variables in the population studied, therefore measurement of an anterior tooth size ratio pre-treatment was not clinically beneficial for determining anterior dental relations post-treatment.