Alveolar bone height in professional musicians.

This study aimed at determining alveolar bone height in musicians playing wind instruments and non-wind instruments. Two hundred and forty-two subjects, 208 men and 34 women, from 3 national orchestras in Stockholm were examined in an intraoral full-mouth survey. The height of alveolar bone, registered by a computerized method, was expressed as a percentage of the root length. Mean alveolar bone height varied from 87.4% in subjects aged 21-30 years to 73.6% in subjects aged 51-60 years. There were no significant differences between the two categories of instrumentalists in any age group. With regard to individual teeth, the greatest values of bone height were observed for canines and second premolars, whereas mandibular incisors and maxillary molars displayed the lowest values. The alveolar bone height was not significantly different for the two categories of instrumentalists in either anterior teeth or posterior teeth. It is concluded that playing wind instruments does not influence the alveolar bone height to such an extent as to be detectable on a large-scale epidemiologic basis.