Prevalence of dental midline shifting among 7- to 15-year-old children in Babylon/Iraq.

Objective: This study aimed to determine the prevalence of dental midline shifting in a group of children with mixed dentition aged 7-15 years in Babylon/Iraq and assess the association between different variables including gender, age stages, residency, and Angle's classes of malocclusions with midline shifting.

Materials And Method: A total of 300 dentate children aged 7-15 years (119 males and 131 females) were randomly chosen from children who visited the Department of Orthodontics, Pedodontics, and Prevention at the College of Dentistry/University of Babylon. The participants were from various environmental areas (162 urban and 88 rural area subjects). The dental midline shifting evaluation includes verifying the maxillary and mandibular dental midline positions with respect to the facial midline, taking philtrum as a guide. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.0 for Windows was used for data analyses using Pearson's Chi-square tests. The significance level was set at < 0.05.

Results: More than half of the total sample had dental midline shifting (55.66%), which was relatively more prevalent in the mandible than in the maxilla. The prevalence of dental midline shifting was more common in females (31.3%), subjects over the age of 12 years (20%), and subjects from urban areas (37%). The midline deviation was more frequent in Angle's class I (34%) and class II (13%) malocclusion than in Angle's class III malocclusion (9%) with statistically significant differences ( = 0.028). 63.47% of the sample had midline shifts of 2 mm or more.

Conclusions: About half of the studied sample showed a maxillary-mandibular dental midline shift. The dental midline shift is more commonly noticed in females and children over 12 years old. A statistically significant difference was found between the shift of the dental midline and Angle's classes of malocclusions, with class I having the greatest midline shift.