Another Look at Skeletal Maturation Using Hand Wrist and Cervical Vertebrae Evaluation

Abstract

Introduction and Aims—The Growth stage of a patient can have considerable influence on diagnosis, treatment goals, timing and planning and the eventual outcome of orthodontic/orthopedic treatment. The purpose of this study was to analyze associations between the cervical vertebrae maturation score (CVMS) and skeletal maturation index (SMI). The second objective was to determine the reproducibility of the measurements on lateral cephalograms and hand-wrist radiographs. Materials and Methods—Lateral cephalometric and left hand-wrist radiographs of 92 untreated subjects (44 females and 48 males) aged from 8 to 17 years were obtained from the files of the Columbia University, Division of Orthodontics and measured for growth stage using cervical vertebrae and hand-wrist methods. Results—A high correlation was revealed between the hand-wrist and cervical vertebrae measurements. The Spearman’s rho correlation coefficient was 0.925 and significant at the 0.01 level. The correlation between hand-wrist and age (0.665, p < 0.01) was slightly greater than that of the CVMS (0.611, p < 0.01). Intra rater reliability was high. When the three categorically modified methods of the Fishman’s 11 skeletal maturation stages in hand and wrist analysis were used to compare with CVMS, methods 2 and 3 were both statistically significantly different according to the Wilcoxon signed ranks test and the Sign test at a significance level of less than 0.05. However, for method 1, the tests showed probability scores of 0.028 and 0.151, respectively, showing no significant difference at the 0.01 level in the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test, and no significant difference in the 0.01 and 0.05 level in the Signed Test. Conclusions—The Fishman’s hand and wrist skeletal maturation index and Bacetti’s cervical vertebrae maturation stages are both useful tools in evaluating growth stages. Fishman’s hand-wrist method is slightly more accurate.