Dental age Estimation in Spanish and Venezuelan children: comparison of demirjian´s and chaillet´s scores

Abstract

Orthopantomographs taken from 308 Spanish-Caucasian and 200 Venezuelan- Amerindian children, aged between 2 and 18 years, were analysed following the Demirjian method. The applicability of this method was tested, and new predictive models for both populations were developed, using both, the original French-Canadian scores described by Demirjian (1976) and the new multi-ethnic dental scores proposed by Chaillet et al. (2005) when the ethnic origin is unknown. A high ethnic influence in dental development was found, with a clear delay in the Venezuelan-Amerindian population in relation to the Spanish-Caucasian one. New graphs were produced to convert the maturity scores to dental age for Spanish and Venezuelan children. With these graphs the Demirjian scores showed to be inadequate after the age of 12 in both populations, while Chaillet scores offered useful information until 14 years of age