Dental Science In Dentistry

Dentistry has much to offer law enforcement in the detection and solution of crime or in civil proceedings. Forensic dental fieldwork requires an interdisciplinary knowledge of dental science. Most often the role of the forensic odontologist is to establish a person 's identity. Teeth, with their physiologic variations, pathoses and effects of therapy, record information that remains throughout life and beyond. Dental professionals have a major role to play in keeping accurate dental records and providing all necessary information so that legal authorities may recognize malpractice, negligence, fraud or abuse, and identify unknown humans, through post-mortem and ante-mortem comparison of records.83,84,85

As estimation of age in the adult human

In this study translucent dentin has been studied in intact teeth in order to correlate with the age of the person as done by earlier reports of various authors like Solheim.31 Miles,9 Bang and Ramm6 Whittaker and Embry.24 However, this is a three-dimensional phenomenon which leads to difficulties in the measuring the translucency accurately. To overcome this difficulty, study not only considered the length as a parameter but also the area of the root dentine as a parameter to correlate with age as was done in few previous studies by Singhal A et al11 and Sabard P et al56 Further to be more accurate in the measurement of translucent dentin, the procedure of dye imbibition was adopted by using 1% methylene blue. The sclerosed dentin remained colourless in this method, normal dentin stained blue, and cementum took up dark blue colour as shown in (figure 8). This was possible because the translucent dentin is made up of completely mineralized tubules that did not permit the entry of dye into this zone. This procedure was adopted by Whittaker and Bakri.11 The translucency of dentin as noted in the ground section is due to an increase in intratubular mineralization. This increase in mineralization has same refractive index as that of peritubular dentin giving translucent appearance within dentin. This translucency is first noted in the apical part of the tooth because of lesser diameter of dentinal tubules in the root dentin compared to the coronal part. Also lesser number of dentinal tubules are noted per unit area in apical part.14,15 The increase in translucency is generally considered as a physiological change with aging process as proved by Azaz et al 21 in his study of impacted canines. They reported increase in dentin translucency with increasing age, even in impacted tooth which is away from any pathological and functional