Correlations between morphology of cervical vertebrae and dental eruption.

The process of dental eruption is submitted to physiological and pathological variables. A series of discrepancies may occur, one of these being a disturbance between dental age and bone age. The assessment of bone age is best made with the cervical vertebral maturation (CVM) method, simplified by Baccetti et al. (2005). The sample studied consisted of 215 orthodontic patients. The dental age was assessed on the orthopantomograph radiographies and the bone age on the lateral cephalograms. For determining the bone age, CVM method was used. Considering dental age, most of the patients (50.2%) have a premature dental age compared to bone age, while patients with normal dental age (27.9%) and patients with late dental age (21.9%) have a lower frequency. The correlation between the dental age and the bone age of the patients shows that patients who have higher values of dental age also have higher values of bone age (p<0.001). The correlation between genders shows that female patients tend to have a higher average value of bone age in comparison to male patients (p<0.001). The authors conclude that assessing bone age based on the morphology of cervical vertebrae and correlating it with the dental age could be of great use in opting for a certain orthodontic treatment plan.