Correlation of dental and chronological age among a group of 130 children from the lower Silesian population

Introduction
Dental age is one of the methods used to determine the physiological age, and the assessment thereof is essential for many branches of science. The standard of general dental and orthodontic diagnostics is a pantomographic image, which can be applied to assess the dental age using the Demirjian method.

Objectives
Determination of the current dental age in the group of children of the lower Silesian population, comparison of the results with data determined using the Demirjian method, and calculation of possible deviations

Material and methods
The research group consisted of 130 Caucasian children (64 girls and 66 boys) aged between 7 and 13 years. The Demirjian method was used to assess the dental age. The following tests were applied: Shapiro-Wilk test, Levene’s test, Wilcoxon rank-sum test, Welch’s test, Tukey’s honest significant difference (HSD) test, χ2 test, and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. For the purposes of the study, the significance level was established as p < 0.05.

Results
: Without division into age groups, the chronological age was ahead of dental maturation, both for girls and boys. It was shown that the difference between the chronological and dental age increases with the rise in chronological maturation, in favour of the chronological age. Based on tests determining whether gender constitutes a factor influencing the calculated value of age differences, the obtained results were statistically insignificant.

Conclusions
The research conducted by the authors shows that in the analysed group the dental age was accelerated in the period of early mixed dentition and delayed in the late mixed or early permanent dentition stage, in relation to the chronological age. Therapeutic decisions made by the orthodontist should be based on the analysis of the child’s actual dental age and should not take into account the chronological age.