Emergence of the Permanent Teeth in Pima Indian Children

Abstract

THE PROCESS of tooth emergence is traditionally a source of information on the status and progress of physiologic development. Concentrating on the applied aspects of the problem, authors of the studies in the literature are publishing for the practicing dentist, orthodontist, and forensic anthropometrist. The practitioner has found this material useful within broad limits in planning treatment and as a criterion of age. However, both the practitioner and the research worker would profit from a more detailed analysis of the patterns of dental eruption.Studies of the emergence of the teeth of the Pima Indians showed that replacement of the deciduous teeth with the permanent ones is for them a process which starts later and finishes earlier than in most other populations. These materials also permitted another view of the importance of the second premolar-second molar eruption sequence. Some authors have claimed that the second premolar followed by the second molar is an advanced trait and the reverse, that is, the second molar followed by the second premolar, is a primitive or ancestral sequence. The Pima material supports the rather recent work and discussions by Garn, Koski, and Lewis' that the so-called ancestral sequence is common in at least several modern populations. In approaching these and other problems it was found that the parameters, methods, types of studies, and the available data from previous publications had to be subjected to review. TOOTH EMERGENCE PARAMETER STUDIESAs the number of studies to determine the parameters of the distribution of tooth emergence with age increase, it becomes apparent that a re-evaluation should be made of the basis of comparability of such studies. Clements, Davies-Thomas, and Pickett2'3 have taken a step in this direction in their recent study of the age and order of permanent tooth emergence in British children. They point out the necessity for both the assembly of new data and the use of modern methods of analysis. Most of the previous studies based their analyses upon the observation of Klein and associates4 that the frequencies of erupting teeth at successive ages follow the normal probability

Mineralization of the mandibular third molar: A study of American blacks and whites

“…There is considerable concordance-and no side preference-in the development of left-right pairs of teeth (Demirjian, 1978), so the quadrant with greater clarity was scored here or, if there was no difference, the side was selected at random. A molar was scored as the highest stage that it had attained (Dahlberg and Menegaz-Bock, 1958). There was no interpolation or selection of the ''closest'' stage.…”

The dental morphology of Pima Indians

“…Importantly, genealogical information was obtained in conjunction with the collection of impressions to allow ultimately for familial analysis. Prior work on subsamples of this Pima collection include studies of tooth crown morphology (Dahlberg and Mikkelsen, 1947;Dahlberg, 1950Dahlberg, ,1951Dahlberg, ,1963Hanihara, 1968;Sofaer et al, 19721, odontometrics (Potter et al, 1968;Hanihara, 19791, and tooth emergence (Dahlberg and Menegaz-Bock, 1958).…”

Application of non-adult Bayesian dental age assessment methods to skeletal remains: the Spitalfields collection

“…This was due to the significant majority of girls in the non-sex-specific training sample. Numerous examples in the literature reported sexual dimorphism in permanent teeth emergence (Hurme, 1949;Dahlberg and Menegaz-Bock, 1958;Garn et al, 1959 were the first e see Demirjian, 1986 for more details) and formation; girls reaching most stages ahead of boys (Haavikko, 1970 reported difference between 0.3 and 1.7 years). Recent work on chronology of dental macrostructural mineralization using DBM and 6-month age intervals confirmed this dimorphism (Heuzé, 2004).…”