Dental crowding and its relationship to tooth size and arch dimensions

Abstract

Background: Well alignments of the teeth in the dental arches achieves good esthetics  and  stability,  and a perfect  tooth  position  provides  ideal conditions  for  good  health  and  optimal  care of teeth. However, crowding of teeth is considered as the most common type of malocclusion.

Aims: To quantify crowding by assessing the tooth size arch size discrepancy in crowded and non crowded arches.

Materials and methods: The study was conducted on study casts obtained from sixty randomly selected students from College of Dentistry– University of Sulaimani in Kurdistan of Iraq with their age ranged from 19-24 years who were divided into crowded and noncrowded groups. For each group cumulative and individual tooth width and arch length were measured. They have been diagnosed and selected according to some specific criteria.

Results: The study showed significant difference in the arch length measurement between the non crowded & crowded (P>0.01). No significant difference of the mesiodistal sums of entire arches between the non crowded and crowded samples (P>0.05) was observed while by individual measurements of tooth mesiodistal dimension highly significant difference were found only in the right lateral incisor (P=0.001)

Conclusion: The arch length was the associated factors in contribution of dental crowding.

Keywords: Dental crowding, malocclusion, arch dimensions.