Age and sex estimation by metric measurements and fusion of hyoid bone in a Turkish population.

The hyoid bone is of great importance in forensic medicine practice and it has been studied for various forensic purposes; however, there have been few studies dealing with age and sex estimation using the hyoid bone. Using discriminant function analysis this study attempts to determine the utility of metric measurements and non-metric variations of the hyoid bone in terms of estimation of sex and age in a Turkish population and to find out differences with other populations by comparison of obtained results with the literature. For this purpose, the hyoid bones of 85 cadavers of known sex and age were extracted and 33 measurements were made with a computer program following photography with a camera.