Brazilian's dental anthropometry: Human identification.

Abstract

Background: Human stature and sex determination are significant data that can and should be used in criminal profiling in the human identification processes. Teeth are widely used in investigations because of their properties of resistance and uniqueness.

Aims: The present study aimed to verify, by means of dental anthropometry, the correlation of these with the stature and sex.

Materials and methods: Measurements of linear (mid distal and incisor cervical) dental measurements were performed on the upper right teeth of Brazilians, aged between 18 and 30 years, being 100 male and 100 female participants. Linear dental measurements were measured with a digital caliper and stature was measured with a stadiometer. For the statistical analysis, the IBM^® SPSS^® 25 Statistics program was used. Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Pearson correlation, and Stepwise-Forward (Wald) logistic regression analyses were applied to sex determination and stature estimation.

Results: The results indicated that all measures performed are dimorphic, but that lateral incisor and canine tooth measurements are statistically significant with a P ≤ 0.001. The obtained model allows for sexing with 70.5% accuracy, being able to be used in anthropological studies in Brazilians.

Conclusion: It can be concluded that dental measurements are useful tools to identify gender and the canine measurements also showed a strong and proportional correlation with stature, but it was not possible to establish a mathematical model for this.