Comparison of Demirjian, Moorrees and Nolla forensic methods to estimate the dental age of children

Abstract

The estimation of the dental age is of vital importance in the forensic field for its vast applications in the identification processes and mostly for the estimation of the chronological age especially in living people, in which there is no proof of their date of birth. To estimate the dental age for forensic application a comparison between the methods of Demirjian, Moorrees and Nolla was held, for which 114 panoramic radiographs of Honduran patients were selected, both genders (57 female and 57 male), with chronological ages between 5 and 17 years old that attended the Orthodontics Department of the Odontological Hospital of the Catholic University of Honduras in Tegucigalpa “Monseñor Agustín Hombach”. The inclusion criteria: patients who don´t have any dental agenesia in the left inferior hemiarcade, nor alterations in dental development; no apicoformation treatments and no premature extraction of the first or third molars, the maturation stages were assigned by the methodology proposed by Demirjian, Moorrees and Nolla. The chronological age was obtained from the clinical files. The difference between the means of dental age estimated by the three methods and the chronological dental age was calculated by means of a Wilcoxon test, due that the sample didn´t have a normal distribution. Morrees (0.31,sd = 1.14) and Nolla (0.1,sd = 1.23) ) overestimate the age in the female sex and underestimate it in the male (0.3/- 0.2, sd = 1.32/1.35), while the Demirjian method underestimates the age in both sexes (-0.4/-0.4, sd = 1.23/1.31). It was evidenced that in the sample studied there are no statistically significant differences between chronological age and dental age estimated by the methods of Demirjian, Moorrees and Nolla