Root Dentin Translucency based Dental Age Estimation in Adults: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Background: In Forensic practice and research, the Gustafson technique is the most popular dental age estimation method that uses six variables, among which Root Dentin Translucency (RDT) is considered to be the best single parameter for dental age estimation as it is the least affected by environmental and pathological factors. Dental age estimation by RDT has been tested on different geographic groups in order to determine its applicability and it has been found that there was an under/overestimation of the age of the subjects in different populations. No systematic review of these studies has yet been published to check the reliability and accuracy of this novel method in estimating chronological age. Objective: To assess the accuracy and reliability of RDT-based dental age estimation in different academic and forensic scenarios by qualitatively summarising the results of RDT-based dental age estimation studies in diverse population samples. Evidence Review: Studies were searched in the Medline, Embase, Directory of open access journals, Cochrane library and Google Scholar databases up to December 2019 with previously defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. The outcome of interest was the difference between chronological age and the age estimated from RDT. Results and Conclusion: A total of 1754 subjects from 16 published studies were included in the final review. Our findings proved that the RDT method tends to overestimate chronological age for both sexes in most of the study population. The overestimated dental age ranges from 2.24 to 15.1 years.