The French–Canadian data set of Demirjian for dental age estimation: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract Background Estimation of age of an individual can be performed by evaluating the pattern of dental development. A dataset for age estimation based on the dental maturity of a French–Canadian population was published over 35 years ago and has become the most widely accepted dataset. The applicability of this dataset has been tested on different population groups. Aim To estimate the observed differences between Chronological age (CA) and Dental age (DA) when the French Canadian dataset was used to estimate the age of different population groups. Materials and methods A systematic search of literature for papers utilizing the French Canadian dataset for age estimation was performed. All language articles from PubMed, Embase and Cochrane databases were electronically searched for terms ‘Demirjian’ and ‘Dental age’ published between January 1973 and December 2011. A hand search of articles was also conducted. Results A total of 274 studies were identified from which 34 studies were included for qualitative analysis and 12 studies were included for quantitative assessment and meta-analysis. When synthesizing the estimation results from different population groups, on average, the Demirjian dataset overestimated the age of females by 0.65 years (−0.10 years to +2.82 years) and males by 0.60 years (−0.23 years to +3.04 years). Conclusion The French Canadian dataset overestimates the age of the subjects by more than six months and hence this dataset should be used only with considerable caution when estimating age of group of subjects of any global population.