Assessment of maturation stages and the accuracy of age estimation methods in a Turkish population: A comparative study.

PURPOSE

This study assessed the associations between chronological age, dental maturation (DM), cervical vertebrae maturation (CVM), and hand-wrist maturation (HWM) in individuals aged 9-19 years. In addition, this study aimed to derive practical methods to evaluate the skeletal age using DM, CVM, or HWM for orthodontic, medical, and forensic purposes and to compare which of these 3 developmental parameters is more accurate for estimating the age of individuals in a Turkish population.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Panoramic, lateral cephalometric, and hand-wrist radiographs of 284 patients aged 9-19 years were used in this study. The DM, CVM, and HWM stages were determined. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov, kappa, Wilcoxon, Kruskal-Wallis, chi-square, and Spearman correlation tests and simple linear regression analysis were used for statistical analysis. The significance level was 0.05.

RESULTS

Statistically significant differences were found between chronological age and DM, chronological age and CVM, and chronological age and HWM in both sexes (<0.05). DM did not show statistically significant differences according to sex (>0.05), but CVM and HWM were statistically different between males and females (<0.05). The DM-estimated age yielded more accurate values than the other methods.

CONCLUSION

All correlations between skeletal and dental stages were statistically significant. Our results showed that there was no statistically significant difference between chronological age and DM-estimated age. Therefore, it can be concluded that DM stages have the potential to be used for legal purposes.