Acceleration in dental development: fact or fiction

Secular trend in the maturation of permanent teeth in a sample of Turkish children over the past 30 years

“…Our results conflict with studies that report positive secular trends in dental maturation in other cultures [3,4,8,22,23,35,49]. Dental age investigations using skeletal remains of children from the last century showed that children today are approximately 1 year more advanced in dental age than children from that time [3].…”

“…Sasso et al [4] showed a statistically significant secular accelerated dental development trend of 0.72 years over a 30-year period (the panoramic films were collected from 1977-1979 and 2007-2009). Holtgrave et al [23] and Nadler [22] reported accelerated dental maturity over the past 40 years due to secular trends in 3-to 9-year-old European boys between 1960 and 1997 [23] as well as in 8.5-to 14.5-year-old boys and girls in the US between the 1970s and 1990s [22].…”

Accuracy of Four Dental Age Estimation Methods in Southern Indian Children

“…Numerous studies have been done using Demirjian et al, method in several populations and consistent overestimation [2,3,8,[19][20][21][22] and underestimation [23] in dental age was observed. Similarly Willems method also showed significant overestimation [24,25], and underestimation [26], Nolla's method also showed overestimation in young children [27][28][29][30][31], and underestimation [32] and significant difference in one sex [33,34] in previous studies. In the present study, Demirjian's and Nolla methods overestimated DA and Willems method underestimated DA.…”

Assessment of dental maturity of children aged 3.5 to 13.5 years using the Demirjian method in an Iranian population

“…All of these studies have demonstrated that the Demirjian method overestimated age between 0.04 years (12) to 3.04 years (1). According to the opinion of the authors, this advancement in dental maturation may be partly explained by the positive secular trend in growth and development observed during the last 35 years (6,8,13,14,(26)(27)(28). Other differences between the populations can be explained by environmental factors such as socio-economic status, nutrition, dietary habits and lifestyle (1).…”