LETTERS FROM OUR READERSTo: Editor, The Angle Orthodontist, RE: Joshi MR. Transmigrant mandicular canines: a record of 28 cases and a retrospective review of the literature. Angle Orthod. 2001;71:12–22.
I have read with interest the article on this subject and would like to comment on some of the topics mentioned in it.
Under the review of literature, the author has mentioned in page 12 that “Thoma1 described this anomaly in living patients for the first time.” In fact, it was Bluestone2 who for the first time described this anomaly in the journal Dental Items of Interest in 1951. Thoma1 described the condition in his textbook published a year later (1952).
The author had mentioned in table 1 (page 13) of the article that bilateral transmigration of mandibular canines was reported for the first time by Joshi et al3 in 1982, not knowing that bilateral transmigration had already been reported by Cowman4 in 1979.
Careful consideration of table 1 (chronological listings of authors and the clinical features of transmigrated canines) in the article revealed that works of eight authors2,4,5–10 were never included in the study. These works should be included in future studies for completeness of the articles and for getting the facts right from the literature. The noninclusion of these studies may even affect the pattern analysis of the transmigrant mandibular canines.
There were more studies11–13 published after 1994 and before 2001 that looked into the anomaly. Finally, I would like to commend the author for a marvelous job done in the compilation and analysis of the literature on the topic of mandibular canine transmigration.