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 (P<0.05). DM did not show statistically significant differences according to sex (P>0.05), but CVM and HWM were statistically different between males and females (P<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.