Cervical vertebral maturation as a biologic indicator of skeletal maturity.

Objective: To identify and review the literature regarding the reliability of cervical vertebrae maturation (CVM) staging to predict the pubertal spurt.

Materials And Methods: The selection criteria included cross-sectional and longitudinal descriptive studies in humans that evaluated qualitatively or quantitatively the accuracy and reproducibility of the CVM method on lateral cephalometric radiographs, as well as the correlation with a standard method established by hand-wrist radiographs.

Results: The searches retrieved 343 unique citations.