A comparison between dental maturity rate in the Swedish and Korean populations using a modified Demirjian method.

Several studies have examined variations in the rate of dental development in children from different populations using the Demirjian method for age estimation in children. Most of them have shown a more or less consistent difference between the French-Canadian population, used to construct the original method, and the population studied. In most instances the Canadian population was lagging behind in the dental development, varying from a few months up to about 1 year. In an earlier study we have showed that there may be problems with the Demirjian method and a modification using a cubic regression model was suggested instead of the manually fitted original model. With this new model the rate of dental development between the Swedish and Korean populations was compared. There were highly statistically significant differences for both boys and girls, demonstrating that Swedish boys are about 2 months, and girls about 6 months earlier in their dental development at certain ages when compared to Korean children.