Dental Cementum in Age Estimation: A Polarized Light and Stereomicroscopic Study

Abstract

Dental hard tissues are good candidates for age estimation as they are less destructive and procedures to determine age can be easily performed. Although cementum annulations and cementum thickness are important parameters in this regard, they are seldom used. This study was undertaken to review the methods, difficulties in execution of techniques, and accuracy of cementum thickness and annulations in estimating the age. Unstained and stained ground sections of tooth were used to measure cemental thickness and count cemental annulations based on which age was estimated and was compared with known age. Although there was positive relation between cemental thickness and annulations with age, only in 1-1.5% of cases, age could be predicted with accuracy.

Age at death estimation by cementochronology: Too precise to be true or too precise to be accurate?

“…On the reference, sample averages of absolute and relative errors respectively are −4.53 years and 9.19% and confidence Intervals respectively range from −5.48 to −3.48 years and from 8.09 to 10.29%. The overall absolute precision is consistent with previous values (Couoh, ; Stott et al, ) and find a place between the most optimistic works (Dias et al, ; Wittwer‐Backofen et al, ), and more moderate results (Charles et al, ; Kasetty, Rammanohar, & Raju Ragavendra, ; Meinl et al, ).…”

“…In the race for performance, correlation coefficients between real age and estimates became a catalyst for cementochronology. They range from 0.42 (Kasetty et al, ) to 0.97 (Wittwer‐Backofen et al, ), and only a minority of investigations resulted in correlation below 0.8. Considering the presumed linear relationship between chronological and estimates, it is conveniently assumed that cementochronology does not require reference populations or statistical support.…”

Assessing the application of tooth cementum annulation relative to macroscopic aging techniques in an archeological sample

“…Despite factors suggesting that TCA might prove more accurate than morphological age indicators for estimating the age of older adults, TCA accuracy in this age group (particularly in individuals over age 50) has been questioned by nearly every large scale study investigating known-age/annulation age correlations (Condon et al, 1986;Kassetty et al, 2010;Klevezal and Shishlina, 2001;Kvaal et al, 1995;Lipsinic et al, 1986;Pilloud, 2004;Rösing and Kvaal, 1998;Stein and Corcoran, 1994;WittwerBackofen et al, 2004). Though not based on degenerative change, one hypothesis put forth is that the circa annular rhythm thought to be responsible for phases of appositional growth becomes less precise in old age, leading to annulation counts significantly deviating from chronological age (Rösing and Kvaal, 1998).…”

Forensic casework in contemporary perspective

“…Analysis of aspartic acid racemization has been utilized in this regard since the 1970s (Helfman and Bada 1975;Masters et al 1978) with significant improvements in recent years (Ohtani 1995, Ohtani et al 1998Yekkala et al 2006;Ohtani et al 2010). Other biochemical approaches with great potential to refine age at death estimation include analyses of lead accumulation (Bercovitz and Laufer 1991;Al-Wattan and Elfawal 2010), cementum annulations (Wittwer-Backofen et al 2004;Kasetty et al 2010), collagen crosslinks (Walters and Eyre 1983), chemical composition of bones and teeth (Kosa et al 1990;Ager et al 2005), advanced glycation end products (Baynes 2001); telomere shortening in chromosomes (Takasaki et al 2003), mitochondrial mutations (Lacan et al 2009) and somatic rearrangement of thymus generated lymphocytes (Zubakov et al 2010).…”