Abstract
One of the largest, longitudinal studies of tooth mineralization is that described by Moorrees, Fanning and Hunt (J Dent Res, 1963) based on children growing up in Boston, Massachusetts, and Yellow Springs, Ohio. This short communication provides tables of the means and standard deviations, by sex, in order to make the data more accessible and usable than the graphic form of the information in the original article. Characteristics of the study and applications are discussed.
Highlights
Tooth formation proceeds in a highly regimented fashion, and the developmental status of formative teeth can be used to assess a child’s dental age, which is one measure of his degree of biological maturity
Tooth formation appears to be under substantial genetic control (Pelsmaekers et al, 1997; Merwin and Harris, 1998)—more so than bone age (e.g., Garn et al, 1965; Keller et al, 1970)
How is dental age figured for a child? The MFH approach—which still is broadly applied—uses their graphs to determine the normative chronological ages at which the formative stage of each scorable tooth has been achieved, these tooth-specific ages are averaged as the person’s dental age
Summary
Tooth formation proceeds in a highly regimented fashion, and the developmental status of formative teeth can be used to assess a child’s dental age, which is one measure of his degree of biological maturity. More recent studies of other groups has disclosed important systematic differences in the tempos of growth among populations (e.g., Fanning and Moorrees, 1969; Haavikko, 1970; Anderson et al, 1976; Harris and McKee, 1990; Liversidge and Molleson, 1999) as well as in the sequencing of tooth formation (Tompkins, 1996). A technical difficulty in using the MFH data is that the information was only published in graphical format; there was no supporting table of descriptive statistics. This obliged users to plot each of their cases on a graph, which is tedious, impractical if sample sizes are large, and still required interpolation of the graph to a numerical value of “dental age.”. The two-fold purpose of the present note is to supply tables of descriptive statistics for the MFH data and to comment on the nature and limitations of these classic data
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