Estimation of stature from odontometry and skull anthropometry - A prospective clinical study

Stature estimation is one of the important and accurate methods used for person identification. It is the height of a person in the upright posture is shown to have a definite and proportional relationship with many parts of the human body such as the cranial and facial bones, long bones, trunk, and foot bones. Teeth are extremely durable even at high temperatures and may be identified even when the rest of the body has undergone decomposition. This study was done to validate the use of odontometric and skull measurements for stature estimation. To evaluate and correlate stature with odontometric parameters such as maxillary Intercanine width (ICW) and Interpremolar width (IPW) and skull anthropometric parameters such as diameter of the head (HD) and circumference of the head (HC) and to obtain a regression equation of each correlating parameters separately and in combination with other parameters. In this present study, the stature was correlated with several odontometric and skull dimensions. Of which, head diameter and head circumference had highly statistically significant value of 0.001 and 0.000 respectively. On combining odontometric values along with the skull dimensions, we found that p value of ICW+HC, ICW+HC+HD, IPW+HD+HC and ICW+IPW+HD+HC was 0.04, 0.008, 0.007, and 0.002 respectively. This study results have shown that odontometric measurements when combined with head circumference and diameter can give more accurate estimate of stature and help in person identification.