Abstract

The achievement of academic and research institutes has increasingly become the subject of ranking by independent organizations. This trend has educational and economic implications, which may pertain to attracting students and endowments as well as allocating of funds to specific educational components. The aims of this article were to discuss the reliability and soundness of the existing academic ranking methods and to propose guidelines for the quantitative assessment of advanced orthodontic programs. This criteria-driven assessment assigns weight factors for the basic components of orthodontic education and provides a template for clarifying the standing of programs. Moreover, a combination of program and individual assessment is proposed to monitor the implementation of educational criteria and assess their effectiveness.

Abstract

This systematic review evaluates long-term dental arch changes after rapid maxillary expansion treatment on orthodontic patients with constricted arches. Clinical trials that assessed dental arch changes through measurements on dental casts or cephalometric radiographs were selected. No patients with surgical or other simultaneous treatment during the active expansion period were accepted. Electronic databases were searched with the help of a senior Health Sciences librarian. Original articles were retrieved from the selected abstracts, and their references were also scanned for possible missing articles. Forty-one articles met the initial inclusion criteria, but 35 were later rejected because they lacked a control group or only evaluated dental changes or used a semirapid technique. Some of them also lacked a reported measurement error. From the remaining articles, two did not report a long-term evaluation. From the final four articles, two measured changes through dental casts and two assessed changes through radiographs (one through lateral cephalometric radiographs and one through posteroanterior radiographs). Similar maxillary molar and cuspid expansion could be found in adolescents and young adults. Significantly less indirect mandibular molar and cuspid expansion was attained in young adults compared with adolescents. A significant overall gain in the maxillary and mandibular arch perimeter was found in adolescents. More transverse dental arch changes were found after puberty as compared with before, but the difference may not be clinically significant. No anteroposterior dental changes were found on lateral cephalometric radiographs.

Abstract

This investigation compares the treatment outcome of early treatment (in the mixed dentition) with that of late treatment (early permanent dentition) using objective evaluation criteria. Pretreatment and post-treatment records of all patients (n = 512) completed from 1998 to 2000 in the graduate orthodontics clinic at the Indiana University School of Dentistry (IUSD) were evaluated by the American Board of Orthodontics Objective Grading System (ABO OGS) and Comprehensive Clinical Assessment (CCA) method developed at IUSD. Two definitions of early treatment were used in this study: (1) all patients started in the mixed dentition with early-treatment objectives and (2) female individuals were <10 years and male individuals were <10.5 years of age when treatment began. Comparison of the final results between early- vs late-treatment groups showed that the early-treatment group had significantly longer treatment time and worse CCA scores than the late-treatment group, regardless of the definition of the early-treatment group or whether the early-debond (premature treatment termination) cases were included or not. There was no significant difference between early- and late-treatment groups regarding the ABO OGS score, which indicated that the CCA method is more sensitive in detecting compromised outcomes for patients with long treatment times. Prematurely terminated treatment was more prevalent in the early-treatment group than in the late-treatment group. In this large sample of consecutive patients (n = 512), the disadvantages of early treatment was prolonged treatment time, worse CCA score, and a higher incidence of premature termination of treatment, which was attributed to patient/parent “burn-out.”

When you need a specialist's care, there is one thing we all want to know. Does the practitioner hold the Boards in that discipline? Boards signify qualifications and proper training. To me Board certification should represent a set of credentials attesting to competency and this information should be available to any interested third party. Orthodontics owes the public this information.

The American Board of Orthodontics recently announced a set of new initiatives that hold the promise of moving the ABO into a leadership position in this area. The goal of these new initiatives has as its hallmark a fundamental potential