Historical Perspective of Dental Age Assessment

TY - CHAP

T1 - Historical Perspective of Dental Age Assessment

AU - Fonseca, Gabriel M.

AU - Capitaneanu, Cezar

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.

PY - 2026/1/14

Y1 - 2026/1/14

N2 - Dental age estimation (DAE) has proven to be a topic of formal scientific interest, at least since the early nineteenth century. Although the progress of its techniques has developed in parallel with human technological evolution, specific historical circumstances have triggered the interest of researchers and the proposal of new procedures. Visualization of dental emergence was the first method of DAE. In London in 1837, Edwin Sander proposed dental emergence as a statistically based standard to regulate child labor, one of the undesirable consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Dental emergence would continue to be the most reliable way of estimating age, with resonant academic contributions throughout the nineteenth century and up to the first three decades of the twentieth century, as a way to assess maturity of the child and establish the appropriate time of entrance to the graded school. The advent of X-rays in 1895 established a new standard by allowing techniques that provide information on dental development for DAE. In particular, the appearance of orthopantomograph (OPG) in 1959 would lead to its use as a reliable and rapid method for DAE. Following this line, in 1973 Arto Demirjian and his collaborators published one of the most influential and validated systems worldwide for DAE in children. In adults, DAE also has an onset, which is probably based on relevant historical events. The post-World War II period led to the need to identify the enormous number of victims’ bodies, particularly in Europe. The contributions of Scandinavian researchers led one of them, Swedish Gösta Gustafson, to publish in 1950 a method based on the evaluation of six dental features for DAE in adults, which would later be adopted and improved to this day. Although all these proposals have been renewed with different contributions from researchers from around the world, the entry into force of a new paradigm in forensic sciences towards the end of the twentieth century has led to such a critical and technical purification, which makes DAE currently the most studied and published topic in forensic odontology.

AB - Dental age estimation (DAE) has proven to be a topic of formal scientific interest, at least since the early nineteenth century. Although the progress of its techniques has developed in parallel with human technological evolution, specific historical circumstances have triggered the interest of researchers and the proposal of new procedures. Visualization of dental emergence was the first method of DAE. In London in 1837, Edwin Sander proposed dental emergence as a statistically based standard to regulate child labor, one of the undesirable consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Dental emergence would continue to be the most reliable way of estimating age, with resonant academic contributions throughout the nineteenth century and up to the first three decades of the twentieth century, as a way to assess maturity of the child and establish the appropriate time of entrance to the graded school. The advent of X-rays in 1895 established a new standard by allowing techniques that provide information on dental development for DAE. In particular, the appearance of orthopantomograph (OPG) in 1959 would lead to its use as a reliable and rapid method for DAE. Following this line, in 1973 Arto Demirjian and his collaborators published one of the most influential and validated systems worldwide for DAE in children. In adults, DAE also has an onset, which is probably based on relevant historical events. The post-World War II period led to the need to identify the enormous number of victims’ bodies, particularly in Europe. The contributions of Scandinavian researchers led one of them, Swedish Gösta Gustafson, to publish in 1950 a method based on the evaluation of six dental features for DAE in adults, which would later be adopted and improved to this day. Although all these proposals have been renewed with different contributions from researchers from around the world, the entry into force of a new paradigm in forensic sciences towards the end of the twentieth century has led to such a critical and technical purification, which makes DAE currently the most studied and published topic in forensic odontology.

KW - Adults

KW - Children

KW - Dental age estimation

KW - Dental development

KW - Dental emergence

KW - History

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105037779366

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-032-08788-1_2

DO - 10.1007/978-3-032-08788-1_2

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:105037779366

SN - 9783032087874

SP - 9

EP - 32

BT - Dental Age Assessment

A2 - Choudhry, Aman

A2 - Kapoor, Priyanka

PB - Springer Nature

CY - Cham

ER -