Soft Tissue Thickness Assessment for Forensic Facial Reconstruction Purposes - Evaluation of Brazilian Children's Data

The knowledge of data regarding children's facial soft tissue thicknesses can contribute to performing improved forensic facial approximations in the process of identification of missing children by Forensic Medicine Institutes, thus contributing to a swifter recognition of these individuals. The aim of this study was to conduct an integrative review and a critical analysis on data regarding Brazilian children's facial soft tissue thickness, available in 2019 for forensic facial reconstruction purposes. The initial search for documents related to the forensic facial reconstruction of Brazilians was carried out in the electronic databases of the Brazilian Bibliography of Dentistry (BBO) and the Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS). Extended research included US National Library of Medicine (PubMed) database and University of São Paulo (USP), São Paulo State University (UNESP) and University of Campinas (UNICAMP) digital libraries. The terms searched were "forensic facial approximation," "forensic facial reconstruction", “facial reconstruction” and "forensic facial reconstitution", and the period surveyed was 1999 to 2019. Initially, the selected studies included data on facial soft tissue thicknesses of Brazilians in general. Only one study involving a child population was identified, specifically children from northeastern Brazil. Once there is a lack of other studies, a critical analysis was carried out at this one available. When comparing the data from this study with those from a study with a similar methodology on Japanese children, large discrepancies were observed among these ethnic groups regarding facial soft tissue thickness data. Because the only study available did not include the facial data of children from all regions of Brazil, its results cannot be extrapolated to the Brazilian child population as a whole. Considering the lack of other studies in the literature on the thicknesses of facial soft tissues of Brazilian children, it is important that further research on this subject be carried out, and includes data from the different Brazilian regions.