Novel dental phenotype in non-syndromic Pierre Robin Sequence: A retrospective study.

Objective: The objective was to investigate dental phenotypes in individuals with non-syndromic Pierre Robin Sequence (ns-PRS) and compare the prevalence of these phenotypes with subjects with non-syndromic cleft palate (ns-CP) and a control group with subjects without any craniofacial anomalies.

Methods: A total of 760 panoramic radiographs of 330 individuals (110 with ns-PRS; 110 with ns-CP and 110 without any malformations) were digitized and evaluated regarding the diagnosis of taurodontism, tooth agenesis, root dilaceration and tooth transposition. Chi-square test was applied to compare the occurrence of dental phenotypes between groups. A P value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results: Total prevalence of dental phenotypes was 94.5% of ns-PRS; 54.5% of ns-CP and 59.1% of the control group subjects with a statistically significant difference for the ns-PRS when compared to the other two groups. Two dental phenotypes, taurodontism and dental agenesis were identified with statistically significant higher prevalences in subjects with ns-PRS when compared with the ns-CP group and the control group (p < 0.001). Taurodontism was the most prevalent dental phenotype, with 92.73% in the ns-PRS group, 40.91% for ns-CP and 44.55% in the control group. Tooth agenesis had a prevalence of 22.7% for ns-PRS, 4.5% for ns-CP and no case in the control group. For the prevalence of root dilaceration and tooth transposition, no statistically significant differences were observed between the three groups.

Conclusions: Due to the high frequency of taurodontism in individuals with ns-PRS, we suggested that this novel phenotype would be important in the phenotypic screening of ns-PRS and could be considered as a phenotype associated with ns-PRS.