ABSTRACT
Introduction: Age estimation has always been a crucial concern in permissible and scandalous investigations for establishing one’s identity. Assessment of chronological age of an individual by dental hard tissues is an important specialty in the turf of forensics especially in enigmatic conditions including mass disasters and festering postmortem residues. Teeth bestowing the properties of hardness, resilience prove to be the reliable material for age estimation in the identification of the unknown. Translucency in root dentin is considered to be one of the best criteria for estimation or assessment of dental age. Objectives: The present investigation evaluates and compares the effectiveness of conventional, stereomicroscopic and digital methods for age estimation by measuring root dentin translucency & concluding the best method among them. Methods: A total of 30 permanent teeth of the age group 21- 80 years were sectionioned longitudinally of thickness 250µm & translucency in root dentin was calculated using conventional, stereomicroscopic & digital methods and was compared. Results: There was no statistically considerable difference (p=0.584) observed in translucency length obtained by the three methods. Linear regression equations derived from the three methods revealed most accurate method as digital followed by conventional and stereomicroscopic to assess age. The digital method is statistically significant with highest accuracy allowing better visualization, easy to use and less time consuming. Conclusion: Taking into consideration the benefits, the present study recommends the use of digital method to assess translucency for age estimation.