Forensic Dentistry : Principles and procedures of identifying a dead person using Dental Information

                                                       

It is quite a complicated principle to go through all the methods at the same time. But in principle, we first need to investigate the Teeth in detail. This will be done by way of taking x rays & photographs and make casts. So to summarize the goal is to find the best in depth information from a dead person’s mouth. Most people’s teeth differ slightly even if no fillings have been inserted. There are slight differences in position of angulations, with respect to size & shape.

When someone has a dead body to deal with you seriously don’t know anything about, the best way is to start collecting the maximum possible information. This is the best method in spite of having Dental records & X rays produced by the police. In these cases the information that we derive is the most accurate way to start the process of investigation. Dentists are not just trained to look at the teeth, but also to look at the palates, tongue & jaws and the mouth in general. All these are a part of a professional training of dentists working in forensic labs.

In forensic investigation when you have an unidentified dead body, you have to first determine its gender whether it’s a male or a female. Even if the body is decomposing or it is just a skeleton, you usually can determine it via the pelvis or form the shape of the skull. In this Upcoming Dental Conference learn all about the forensic dentistry and its related aspects in this world.

Then you start to look at the age of the person, when they died.  The human fetus is only a centimeter and a half long, but his teeth are beginning to form. By the age of about 2 1/2, all the baby teeth will have erupted into the mouth. Then there is a kind of plateau, nothing seems to be happening, but in fact the permanent teeth, which also already started to develop in the womb, come through when the child is about 6 years old, and they go on erupting through to the age of 18 and they are still growing until the age of 21.

The real problem in determination of age arises after the age of 21 when everything sort of shuts down. When this occurs forensic experts take one tooth out of the body and slice it under the machine lengthwise to measure certain changes happening to the root of the tooth. The older you get, the root of the tooth becomes transparent and this transparency starts around the age of 25 & continues until old age. This way it could be determined how old the body was when it died.

A more accurate determination of age could be done from bio-chemistry of the tooth with help from amino acids which is basically the building blocks of life. In the teeth they are all left-handed. That is because of a very complicated transport system for these amino-acids to the teeth. It can only handle left-handed ones, so all our teeth become as if they were left-handed. So by way of this we need to take out the tooth of the dead body, remove the amino-acids in the laboratory and analyze for left- and right-handedness.

Such types of complexities make Forensic dental science a very tasking yet interesting feature to work with. The main complexity would be to generate evidence which needs to [presented in the court and hence every aspect has to checked & double checked. This profile needs a person with strong will as working on a dead body is absolutely not desirable for anyone and the person working does possess nerves of steel. DNA identification is a part of forensic dentistry. Also the DNA obtained from the teeth is pretty good & well protected and most importantly not contaminated.

Hence the forensic dentistry is a really hard task but comparative to other body parts the samples obtained via the dental parts is more reliable in terms of forensic sciences.

International European Dental Congress has Special training session and workshop on Forensic Dentistry. Come and Join us to learn more about this technique and learn about this Dental Profession.