Taurodontic teeth in cone beam computed tomography: pictorial review

Abstract

Objective: Taurodontism is a developmental disorder with enlargement of the body of the tooth and lack of cervical constriction, which results in a large pulp chamber and small roots with the apical displacement of furcation. Taurodontism exists in deciduous, and definitive unilateral, and bilateral teeth. We found that taurodontism was also described in 67 syndromes. We proposed a review of the open access literature on taurodontism, a new clinical classification of taurodontic teeth with illustrations from free open access literature, and from our case serie of 15 patients.
 Material and methods: We performed a systematic search for articles with free full text about taurodontism. The search was performed by one observer in PubMed database. We found 168 articles, and after application of inclusion/exclusion criteria we finally selected 136 articles for the review.
 Results: we provided 34 figures of taurodontic teeth related to: 1) Unilateral mandibular first premolar, 2) Unilateral mandibular second premolar, 3) Bilateral mandibular first and second premolar, 4) Bilateral upper maxillary first premolars, 5) Bilateral mandibular second molars, 6) Bilateral upper maxillary second premolar and left first molar, 7) Bilateral upper maxillary third molars, 8) Bilateral upper maxillary first and second molars, 9) Bilateral upper maxillary first, second, and third molars, 10) Bilateral upper maxillary molars (third molars, second, and first left upper molars), and mandibular molars (first right, and left mandibular molars, right third molar), 11) Bilateral upper maxillary molars (first, second, third right, and left upper molars), and mandibular molars, 12) Unilateral first mandibular premolar with cleft, 13) Bilateral molars of the mandible and the upper maxilla (adolescent patient who received chemotherapy at the age of 3-years-old to treat retinoblastoma), 14) Unilateral first maxillary molar (Treacher-Collins syndrome).
 Conclusions: We proposed a new clinical classification of taurodontic teeth based on hypo-, meso-, and hypertaurodontism, and on different types of deciduous, and definitive teeth (42 boxes). We were first to provide free reference images for: 1) upper maxillary second premolar hypertaurodontism, 2) mandibular second premolar mesotaurodontism, 3) upper maxillary third molar meso-and hypertaurodontism, 4) mandibular first molar hypotaurodontism, 5) mandibular third molar mesotaurodontism. We were also first to freely illustrate taurodontism related with chemotherapy, cleft palate patients, and Treacher-Collins syndrome.