Dental age assessment: the applicability of Demirjian's method in south Indian children.

The paper concerns the testing of Demirjian's method of age assessment in South Indian children. Since previous studies have shown the inapplicability of Demirjian's method on other populations, an attempt to compile a maturity standard for South Indian children was made. An additional independent indicator of age was employed, namely the skeletal age. The material was 184 South Indian children aged 5 to 15 years and an additional 34 children as the test sample. It was found that Demirjian's method gave an overestimation of 3.04 and 2.82 years in males and females, respectively. The skeletal age was found to differ from the dental and chronologic age. It may be concluded that the accuracy of age estimation based on Demirjian's method is not applicable for the South Indian children. For the population to be tested, it is imperative that individual assessment parameters need to be put forward because of wide ethnic differences.