A Study on Congruity between Clinical and Metric Norms in Human Dentition

The relationship between dental-jaw system morphologic deviations and functional and esthetic disturbances, which may lead to aggravation of both general organism disorders and local periodontal pathologic alterations and early tooth loss, has focused the increasing attention of orthodontists. Our study aimed at examining the congruity between normal occlusion-articulation relations in permanent dentition of a patient sample defined as normal on prophylactic examinations and some metric methods used in orthodontics and anthropology, in order to establish if there were any metric changes in the dental arch, although the availability of normal occlusion relations. Our examinations in a sample of 60 subjects (aged between 14 and 30 years) found that for the norm of occlusionarticulation relations defined by Gerlach’s method, congruity was observed in 75% of the cases; for the norm of transversal relations defined by Korkhaus’ method, congruity was observed in 53.3% and for the norm of sagittal relations defined by Korkhaus’ method – in 71.2% of the cases. The anthropometric examinations showed that concerning palatal indices, the examined palates were most frequently brachystaphylic (85.6%) and mesostaphylic (14.4%), in conformity with the previously observed results for the Bulgarian population (2). Palatal expansion was predominant in males and palatal compression – in females, a fact that could be related to general individual development. The results showed that from a clinical point of view, the differentiation of a “normal group” including children with normal occlusion-articulation relations, is justifiable, although the availability of some metric deviations.