Abstracts
Teeth are in excellent material in living and non-living populations for anthropological, gentic, odontologic and forensic investigations. Some times, only teeth are brought for forensic examination. So determination of stature from the teeth is an important aspect in establishing identity in such cases. The aim of the present study was to estimate the stature from Mesiodistal, bucco-lingual dimension’s of maxillary and mandibular teeth in a sample of 407 adolescents from North India. As a part of Indian cast system, mostly North Indian are an endogamous group. Along with stature, Mesiodistal and buccolingual diameter’s of maxillary or mandibular teeth were taken on each subject. The finding suggest that all the cephalo-facial measurements are significantly correlated with stature (P<0.01, p <0.001); the measurements of Mesiodistal Diameter of total maxillary have strong correlation with stature than other teeth dimension’s. This was also supported by the regression analysis, which shows that Mesiodistal Diameter of all teeth of maxillary arch measurements give better prediction of stature. Reliability of the regression formulae was checked by comparing the estimated and actual stature within the same sample and in another sample taken from a mixed population of North India.

Key words: Forensic odontology, stature estimation, teethdimension, bucco-lingual, mesio-distal.