Comparative Study of Panoramic Mandibular Parameters in Postmenopausal Osteoporotic women

ABSTRACT

Osteoporosis has recently been recognized as a major health problem in the elderly population. The disorder is manifested as a loss of bone mass accompanied by structural alteration of bone and increased incidence of fracture. Mandible also may be affected. So, I evaluated panoramic views of 66 postmenopausal women for finding the possibility of useful diagnostic mandibular parmeters of osteoporosis. To know the correlationship between skeleton and mandible, the average of the bone mineral density of lumbar from 2nd to 4th by the dual energy X-ray absorptiometry(DEXA, LUNAR DPZ. USA), and age and mandibular parameters, that is, the number of residual teeth, alveolar ridge resorption ratio, panoramic mandibular index (PMI), mandibular cortical width (MCW), angular cortical thickness (ACT), ramus cortical thickness (RCT), morphology of mandibular inferior cortical (MIC) were compared. And I divided the all tested women to the osteoporotic group and non-osteoporotic group by the use of T-score-2.0, which was derived from skeletal bone mineral density (BMD). To find the correlationship of the each group with mandibular parameters, t-test and discriminant analysis were done. The results of the t-test were that all parameters were highly related with 2 groups (p<0.05). Especially ACT, MIC, age have had even higher correlationship than others (p<0.001). The results of the discriminant analysis by the use of these ACT, MIC and age were that the discriminant function was Z =-2.973+(-1.447)x(ACT)+1.131x(MIC score)+(0.052)x(age), the cutting score was 0.257 and the classification accuracy was 84.8%. Therefore I suggest that the consideration of the angular cortical thickness (ACT), the age of patient and the morphology of mandibular inferior cortical(MIC) may help find the osteoporosis.