Craniofacial development plays an important role in the formation of occlusion. It can not be overstated that the key to successful orthodontic treatment for malocclusion resulted from the skeletal imbalance basically relies on through understanding of the growth and development of craniofacial complex and the accurate prediction of their growth pattern.
Until recently the concept of the mean on the absolute and relative growth has been widely accepted for an individual assessment. In addition, it is for more useful to apply relative growth based on biological age than the chronological age.
In this study, we tried to apply the concept of spatial proportional change in body height and some certain parts of the body in an adolescent patient for the statistical prediction of the craniofacial complex.
The sample comprised cross-sectional data of 447 male and 339 female Koreans ranging in age from 6 to 18 years. The records collected were frontal and lateral roentgenocephalo-grams, hand wrist X-ray film and body height on each subject.
Twelve variables were selected for cephalometric analysis to represent the craniofacial morphology. Besides, hand wrist X-ray films were also put to the evaluation of bone maturation as skeletal maturity indicators (SMI). Correlations among chronological age, body height and cephalometric data came out to show the results as follows ;
1. Increase in the coordinate scores of SMI of both male and female was proportional to an increment of age, showing a rapid acceleration in SMI at the age of 10 in male, and 8 in female on average. At SMI coordinate scores 4 and 5, the largest age difference between the sexes was recognized with about 2. 2 years advance in female.
2. As judged according to SMI, growth changes in body height and craniofacial complex showed a wide range of variety in sex and each component of it.
3. Quantified SMI showed a strong correlation with the mandibular body length in both male and female. Although these matched correlations varied considerably, the higher were seen in the newly quantified age division. This might suggest that growth prediction would be possible within a limit of period.
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