Analysis of Metric and Morphological Dental Traits in Relatives

Abstract

Background: Teeth can provide evidence about the nature and extent of variation among populations. Teeth are also valuable evidence in living and nonliving populations for anthropological, genetic, odontologic, and forensic investigations. It is known that dental traits are characterized by low sexual dimorphism. This study aims to analyze dental traits of permanent teethes within a group of related individuals on the basis of the frequency of dental morphological and metric traits. Methodology: 82 adult individuals were grouped according to relation and according to gender. Twenty-six dental morphological traits were scored from prepared dental casts of all individuals. Dental metric data were recorded for 14 bucco-lingual crown dimensions and mesio-distal dimensions. Results: The study showed high frequency of tuberculum dentale, carabelli’s cusp and four-cusped mandibular second molars. Dental traits with low frequency included winging, interruption groove, congenital absence of incisors, four- cusped mandibular first molars, and six-cusped mandibular first molars. In addition to, statistically significant differences between the related and non-related groups with respect to the frequency of occurrence of the winging, accessory cusps of maxillary second premolars, hypocone, lingual cusp number of mandibular second premolars, anterior fovea, Deflecting wrinkle, Protostylid, groove pattern of mandibular first molars and cusp number of mandibular second molars. Regarding metric traits, the study demonstrated significant difference between means of buccolingual diameter of upper canines, upper second molars and lower first premolars of related and unrelated individuals and mesodistal diameter of upper lateral incisors. Conclusion: low frequency traits would be of great value for evaluation of kinships more than the common traits that be of limited value in kinship evaluation while due to their high frequency in different population.