Forensic Dental Age Estimation: Reliability Rating Compared to Clavicula

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the age determination in forensic expert opinions at the Institute of Forensic Medicine (Mainz) over the last ten years and to determine the reliability rate of wisdom teeth in comparison to the clavicle. A total of 112 expert opinions were prepared between 2011 and 2021, following the guidelines established by the Working Group for Forensic Age Diagnostics (AGFAD). Five indicators were studied: clavicle development coded according to Wittschieber et al. using computed tomography and wisdom tooth development 18, 28, 38 and 48 coded according to Demirjian’s staging method in a dental panoramic radiograph. Following an ordinary least square regression analysis performed separately for each of the five indicators, it was possible to investigate whether the addition of more than one of the indicators would lead to a more predictive value for the age determination. The combination of the clavicle and tooth 48 showed the best value. Adding tooth 38, which showed the second-best prediction in the bivariate analyses, led to an increase of the explained variance of 11% to a total of 58% explained variance (p < 0.001). The addition of further wisdom teeth did not show any relevant effect. For the clinical performance of dental age diagnostics, the teeth of the mandible, in combination with the clavicle, should be primarily used.

Keywords

Age estimation / Wisdom teeth / Clavicle / Multi-factorial age estimation

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, M.B., K.E., K.P.; methodology, M.B., J.H., K.P.; software, M.B.; validation, K.P., M.B., K.E., T.G. and J.H.; formal analysis, K.P.; investigation, M.B., K.E., P.B.; resources, M.B., K.E., P.B.; data curation, M.B., K.K., P.B.; writing—original draft preparation, M.B., K.E.; writing—review and editing, K.P., T.G. and K.K.; visualization, M.B.; supervision, K.P.; project administration, M.B. and K.P. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Ethics Statement

The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and Ethical approval was waived by the local Ethics Committee of Rhineland-Palatinate in view of the retrospective nature of the study and all the procedures being performed were part of the routine care.

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data Availability Statement

The data from this study were part of the dissertation paper from P.B. Data can be seen in Table 1, Table 2 and Table 3 and Figure.

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