PREDICTION OF AGE USING CEMENTUM IN SOUTH INDIAN POPULATION – AN OBSERVATIONAL STUDY

INTRODUCTION: Age estimation plays a major role in evidence based dental identification, though the Forensic importance of age estimation criteria’s includes certain parameters in tooth. The analysis of ground sectioned tooth in victim identification plays an important factor in prediction of age and sex of the particular person. Even with a single tooth, DNA analysis, Morphological analysis, Histopathological Analysis, Metric and Nonmetric analysis using radiographs can be done for the purpose identification. AIMS: The aim of the present study is to estimate the age of an individual by using width of the cementum with the help of a binocular light microscope. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The study sample consisted of 50 freshly extracted tooth was collected from random individuals between the age group of 20 to 70 years. Longitudinal ground sections of each tooth were prepared by using electrical lathe machine and finishing was done using arkansas stone. The ground sectioned tooth were examined under the binocular microscope in different magnifications ( 10x , 40x and 100 x). The results were calculated for further statistical analysis using SPSS software version 22.0.The results obtained were subjected to further Statistical Analysis. RESULTS: The results shows that, Since p values obtained were greater than 0.05 in both the cases, shows that there is no significant difference between ages as well as width of the cementum. The age shows minimum standard error of 2.2 for male, 2.6 for female and width of the cementum the standard error was 0.22 for male and 0.24 for females. The Regression analysis also was done to estimate age between both individual. CONCLUSION : Cementum is one of the major area to calculate age especially older individuals and it has evidenced a good results in many other studies. The present study conclude that the entire results shows that width of the cementum shows the very accurate results for age estimation .