Dental age assessment (DAA) of Afro-Trinidadian children and adolescents. Development of a Reference Dataset (RDS) and comparison with Caucasians resident in London, UK

The large number of extant Dental Panoramic Tomographs of Afro-Trinidadian subjects were collected and Tooth Development Stages (TDSs) were assessed for each of the 878 radiographs to provide a Reference Dataset (RDS) of Afro-Trinidadian children and adolescents. The values for each of the 256 TDSs present were statistically significantly different from the values for the same TDSs in the UK Caucasian RDS. A validation study of 50 radiographs of Afro-Trinidadian subjects from 24 boys and 26 girls were assessed to enable calculation of the Dental Age (DA). The DA calculated using the UK Caucasian RDS was statistically significantly different from the chronological age. The same radiographs were used to calculate the Age of Attainment of the individual Tooth Development Stages for females and males in both the UK Caucasian subjects, and the Afro-Trinidadians. The majority of these comparisons showed the TDSs in Afro-Trinidadian subjects to develop earlier than the UK Caucasian subjects by approximately 8 months.