Applicability of Demirjian’s method for age estimation in a sample of Italian children with Down syndrome: A case-control retrospective study

•Demirjian’s method overestimates the chronological age in Italians.•Demirjian’s method unsuitable for age estimating in Down syndrome.•Dental development similar in Down syndrome and healthy individuals. Age estimation is widely applied in several clinical and forensic fields. The radiographic eval...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Forensic science international 2019-05, Vol.298, p.336-340
Main Authors: Bagattoni, Simone, D’Alessandro, Giovanni, Gatto, Maria Rosaria, Piana, Gabriela
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Age determination
Calcification
Children
Chronology
Cysts
Demirjian’s method
Dental age
Dentistry
Down syndrome
Down's syndrome
Females
Forensic odontology
Forensic science
Forensic sciences
Gender
Intellectual disabilities
Legal medicine
Males
Methods
Mineralization
Orthodontics
Pediatrics
Rank tests
Statistical analysis
Statistical significance
Teeth
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Summary:•Demirjian’s method overestimates the chronological age in Italians.•Demirjian’s method unsuitable for age estimating in Down syndrome.•Dental development similar in Down syndrome and healthy individuals. Age estimation is widely applied in several clinical and forensic fields. The radiographic evaluation of dental development is one of the most accepted tools for this purpose. Among the different methods proposed, Demirjian’s method was the most extensively used and tested in the medical literature revealing that the original standards for the French–Canadian population tends to over-estimate the age of different population groups. The aims of this study were to evaluate the applicability of the Demirjian method in a sample of Italian children with Down syndrome (DS) and to compare the data with age and gender matched healthy subjects (non-DS). A retrospective study was performed on 146 orthopantomograms of DS individuals aged 6.3–16 years. The mean chronological age (CA) and the mean dental age (DA) were calculated. Using Cohen’s kappa statistics, the inter- and intra-examiner agreement was reported as good (k = 0.75) and very good (k = 0.86). The differences between CAs and DAs were statistically significant for males and females (Wilcoxon Signed Rank test; p 
ISSN:0379-0738
1872-6283
DOI:10.1016/j.forsciint.2019.03.015