Comparison of miller’s classification of gingival recession defects with mahajan’s classification of gingival recession defect: A reliability study

Abstract

Background: Gingival recession is a common periodontal problem encountered in most populations. A number of classification systems are available to classify gingival recession defects (GRDs), but there has been a lack of consensus among the clinicians regarding the choice of classification system to classify GRDs. Recently, Miller's classification has been criticized owing to its inherent limitations. Mahajan's classification was proposed to eliminate the drawbacks of Miller's classification system. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no study testing or comparing the reliability of Miller's classification; therefore, the present study was done to compare the reliability of Miller's classification with Mahajan's classification. Materials and Methods: The sites selected for the study were classified for GRD according to either Miller's classification or Mahajan's classification by the two groups of four examiners. All the examiners were calibrated for the two classification systems and classified the selected sites accordingly. Kappa statistics was performed to analyze the intra-and interrater agreement among the four examiners. Results: A total of 609 gingival recession sites in 91 patients (49 males and 42 females) were classified. At the end of the study, Mahajan's classification had a higher intrarater (κ = 0.93-0.83) and interrater reliability (κ = 0.93) compared to Miller's classification for GRD for both intrarater (κ = 0.57-0.68) and interrater observations (κ = 0.66), respectively. Conclusions: Miller's classification system was less reliable than Mahajan's classification system.

Assessing the Reliability of Miller’s Classification and Cairo’s Classification in Classifying Gingival Recession Defects: A Comparison Study

“…The distribution of recession defects according to Miller's and Cairo's classification by examiners for both of the observations is shown in Tables 4 and 5. The level of agreement was obtained using Landis and Koch's (1977) criteria [27]. Tables 6 and 7 show the intra-examiner reliability of the examiners with respect to Miller's and Cairo's classifications, while Tables 8 and 9 show the inter-examiner reliability.…”