7 years of Longitudinal Study on Pneumatization of Maxillary Sinuses using Lateral Cephalogram / 대한해부학회지

ABSTRACT

Maxillary Sinus is one of the four sinuses located in human skull, which is pyramidal shape of varying size and form. It has 4 surfaces, which are facial, infratemporal, orbital and nasal surface. It originates from invagination of mucosa at the middle nasal meatus, and the diameter at birth is reported to be only 3~4 mm. The primary pneumatization site is the inferior medial site of ethmoidal infundibulum, and the secondary pneumatization starts at 5 month after birth, proceeding inferior to the nasal capsule and penetrating the spongy bone of maxilla. This pneumatization phenomenon contributes the growth of maxillary sinus, and has been studied by several authors for many years. However, the study of the growth of human maxillary sinus, especially the longitudinal study, has been very scanty because of many reasons. Therefore, we studied the patterns of pnematization of human maxillary sinuses using longitudinal lateral cephalometric data. From 1995 to 2001, that is for 7 years, the lateral cephalograms of total 410 children (from 6 years old to 12 years) were taken with no loss of follow-up, after discarding the data which include lack of even one year. After tracing the outline of maxillary sinus, the area, height, and sagittal length of maxillary sinuses were measured. And the annual increase or decrease and sum of it were calculated. The descriptive statistics including average and standard deviation, and correlation test for each sex were performed using SPSS ver 10.0. The average area of maxillary sinuses were 470.70mm2 at 6, 544.31mm2 at 7, 604.80mm2 at 8, 647.35mm2 at 9, 761.04mm2 at 11, 837.01mm2 at 12 years old, and the total increase from 6 to 12 years old was 78.86%. The result of this study showed that there was weak to moderate sexual difference of pneumatization of maxillary sinus. And the correlation between somatic growth and the growth of maxillary sinus were statistically significant. However, the correlations were substantively non-significant since the correlation coefficients were relatively low. Continuing studies are thought to be mandatory for thorough understanding the growth of human maxillary sinus and its relation to the somatic growth.