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Abstract: Dental age assessment is one the most accurate methods for estimating the age of an unknown person. Demirjian''s dataset on a French-Canadian population has been widely tested for its applicability on various ethnic groups including southern Chinese. Following inaccurate results from these studies, investigators are now confronted with using alternate datasets for comparison. Testing the applicability of other reliable datasets which result in accurate findings might limit the need to develop population specific standards. Recently, a Reference Data Set (RDS) similar to the Demirjian was prepared in the United Kingdom (UK) and has been subsequently validated. The advantages of the UK Caucasian RDS includes versatility from including both the maxillary and mandibular dentitions, involvement of a wide age group of subjects for evaluation and the possibility of precise age estimation with the mathematical technique of meta-analysis. The aim of this study was to evaluate the applicability of the United Kingdom Caucasian RDS on southern Chinese subjects. Dental panoramic tomographs (DPT) of 266 subjects (133 males and 133 females) aged 2–21 years that were previously taken for clinical diagnostic purposes were selected and scored by a single calibrated examiner based on Demirjian''s classification of tooth developmental stages (A–H). The ages corresponding to each stage of tooth developmental stage were obtained from the UK dataset. Intra-examiner reproducibility was tested and the Cohen kappa (0.88) showed that the level of agreement was ‘almost perfect’. The estimated dental age was then compared with the chronological age using a paired t-test, with statistical significance set at p <0.01. The results showed that the UK dataset, underestimated the age of southern Chinese subjects by 0.24 years but the results were not statistically significant. In conclusion, the UK Caucasian RDS may not be suitable for estimating the age of southern Chinese subjects and there is a need for an ethnic specific reference dataset for southern Chinese. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Background: The accuracy of estimated age should depend on the reference data sets (RDS) from which the maturity scores or Ages of Attainment (AoA) were obtained. This study aimed to test the accuracy of age estimation from three different population specific dental reference datasets (RDS)., Methods: Two hundred and sixty six dental panoramic radiographs of subjects belonging to southern Chinese ethnicity were scored and dental age (DA) was estimated from three reference datasets: French-Canadian, United Kingdom (UK) Caucasian and southern Chinese. Statistical significance was set at p < 0.05 and for each method, the difference between the chronological age (CA) and dental age (CA-DA) was calculated using paired t-tests. In addition, Chi-square tests were performed to evaluate the accuracy of the age estimates within specific time interval from CA., Results: The estimated age difference (CA-DA) using the French Canadian RDS was - 0.62 years for males and - 0.36 years for females. For the UK Caucasian RDS, the age difference was 0.25 years for males and 0.23 years for females. The difference observed using the southern Chinese RDS was - 0.02 years for both genders and the difference was not statistically significant (p > 0.05). The southern Chinese RDS estimated the age of 80% of subjects within ±12 months range, and 90% of subjects within ±18 months range (p < 0.05) showing it to be more accurate than other datasets., Conclusion: It is concluded that population specific Reference Data Sets improve the accuracy of dental age estimation.