Comparative Evaluation between Cervical Vertebrae and Hand-wrist Maturation for Assessment of Skeletal Maturity Orthodontic Patients

The aim of the study was to find a correlation between the evaluation of skeletal maturation performed by the study of cervical vertebrae maturation indicators and the evaluation obtained by the hand and wrist maturation indicators. A radiographic hand-wrist bone analysis and cephalometric cervical vertebral analysis of 100 patients (36 males and 64 females) ranging from 9 to15 years were examined. The hand-wrist bone analysis was evaluated by the Bjork index, whereas the cervical vertebral analysis was assessed by the cervical vertebral maturation stages method of Bacetti. To define vertebral stages, morphological evaluation of three cervical vertebrae (2nd to 4th) was done. Bjork’s nine stages were reduced to five growth intervals (A-E) to relate to five stages (I-V) of cervical vertebral maturation method. The spearman correlation coefficient was 0.944 (P<.01) between cervical vertebral maturation and hand-wrist maturation for sexes combined and 0.936 (P<.01) for males and 0.912 (P<.01) for females respectively. The result shows that cervical vertebrae can be used with the same confidence as hand-wrist radiographs to evaluate skeletal maturity, thus avoiding the need for an additional radiograph.