25 April 2025

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Forensic pediatric dentistry

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Forensic dentistry is the legal field of dentistry which analyses dental evidence in the interest of justice. Pediatric dentistry is that dental specialty concerned with the treatment of dental diseases in children. This specialty is utilized for identification of individuals through visual, clinical, and radiographic interpretation of sound and caries involved teeth, eruption sequence of teeth, shedding sequence of teeth, tooth calcification and maturation, fracture of teeth, root canal therapy, type of restorations and dental crowns and bridges, pit and fissure sealants, appliances, oral and maxillofacial pathologies and associated syndromes and injuries of teeth and tooth mark examination. This specialty is also utilized for age estimation studies which include eruption sequence, Schour and Massler chart, Demirjian's method using dental maturation chart, and Nolla's stages of calcification. This specialty also plays an important role in recognizing child abuse. This paper aims to discuss the forensic aspect of pediatric dentistry from the Indian context.

Forensic dentistry is the legal field of dentistry which analyzes dental evidence in the interest of justice. Dental evidence has been gathered for the identification of victims and suspects in mass disasters, abuse, and organized crimes.[1] The dental evidence is displayed in the following sequence in the court of law, i.e., proper handling, thorough examination, perfect evaluation, and true presentation.[1] A working categorization for forensic dentistry was formulated based on the relationship of various dental specialties with forensic dentistry.[2] A detailed evaluation about the utility of nine dental specialties with forensic dentistry was ascertained to know the forensic implications of each individual dental specialty and to do research in the parent dental specialty.[3] A simplified Indian coding was proposed for forensic dental identification.[4]

Pediatric dentistry is utilized for identification of individuals and age estimation studies and for recognizing child abuse. This paper aims to discuss the forensic aspect of pediatric dentistry from the Indian context.

A review of the literature was done using PubMed from 2010 to 2017 to evaluate the forensic aspect of pediatric dentistry from the Indian context. The following keywords were searched in PubMed: identification, sound teeth, caries involved teeth, eruption sequence of teeth, shedding sequence of deciduous teeth, tooth calcification and maturation, fractures of teeth, root canal therapy, type of dental restorations, dental crowns and bridges, pit and fissure sealants, appliances, oral and maxillofacial pathologies with associated syndromes, age estimation and child abuse. The Indian authors study was selected from PubMed.

Author: Shamim, Thorakkal

Source: https://journals.lww.com/