PURPOSE:

We aimed to establish a practical method to evaluate skeletal age using cervical vertebrae.

METHODS:

The study consisted of hand-wrist and cephalometric radiographs of 324 subjects (167 girls, 157 boys; age range, 7.3–17.2 years). Skeletal ages of the subjects were calculated from hand-wrist radiographs, and cervical vertebral bodies were measured using cephalometric radiographs. A single formula based on C3 and C4 vertebral body heights with different coefficients for each gender was derived using ridge regression analysis.

RESULTS:

The correlation coefficients for vertebral and hand-wrist bone age were 0.825 and 0.856 for girls and boys, respectively. The correlations among vertebral bone age and C3 and C4 vertebral body heights were also found to be significant. The intraclass correlation (ICC) score was found to be 0.914, which shows high consistency between the two measurements of the same investigator for each C3 and C4 vertebral body height result.

CONCLUSION:

The formula derived for evaluating skeletal age in cephalometric radiographs is reliable and can be applied to both girl and boy subjects for legal requirements or therapeutic needs of age estimation.