Dental maturity in South France: A comparison between Demirjian's method and polynomial functions.

The dental maturity of 1031 healthy southern French subjects aged between 2 and 18 years was studied with dental panoramic tomograms. Demirjian's method based on seven and eight teeth has been used to determine maturity scores as a function of age and polynomial functions to determine age as a function of score. We give gender-specific tables of maturity scores and development graphs for each method. The goal of these methods is different because of the nature of the predictions. The percentiles give the dental maturity compared to a standard for a specific age, and polynomial functions give an age prediction with a confidence interval for age. The variations in dental maturity are specific to each population. Thus, the aim of this study is to give the dental maturity standards for southern French children and to compare both the efficiency and applicability of each method in several fields such as forensic sciences or dental health for the clinicians. The addition of the third molar increased the reliability and the capacity of prediction up to 18 years. The polynomial functions showed the best reliability (1.3% of misclassified) and the percentile methods the best accuracy (more or less 1.2 years, on average, between 2 and 18 years of age).