Original title: Development and validation of a formula for objective assessment of cervical vertebral bone age
Bone ageAn estimate of how mature a person’s bones are. estimates how mature a person’s bones are, which can differ from their age in years. Researchers measured the third and fourth neck bones on side-view X-rays from Asian South Indian boys and girls. They used those measurements to create a different estimating formula for each gender. In a separate group, the estimates were similar to bone ages from hand-and-wrist X-rays and to chronological age.
Imagine checking how much a child has grown by looking at the fit of their clothes. That can be hard to judge by eye, so you might use a few measurements and a rule to make the estimate more consistent. In this paper, measurements of two neck bones are used in separate rules for boys and girls to estimate how mature their bones are.
Clinicians assessing growth may be able to estimate skeletal maturity from a side-view dental X-ray, rather than relying only on visual judgments of vertebrae. The formulas were developed for Asian South Indian patients, so the abstract does not establish that they work for everyone.
The abstract supports the formulas for Asian South Indian patients, not other populations. It does not report how accurate the estimates were for individual patients, how they perform against other methods, or whether they are useful in clinical decisions beyond assessing skeletal maturity.
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Development and validation of a formula for objective assessment of cervical vertebral bone age — Raghavan Chandrasekar, Shyamala Chandrasekhar, Shantha Sundari et al. — Progress in Orthodontics — doi:10.1186/s40510-020-00338-0
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.