Quantification of Dental Occlusal Variation: A Review of Methods

Abstract

Occlusion—how the teeth fit together within and between the arches—has important consequences functionally and especially esthetically. Occlusal variation is considerable in modern westernized societies, but the occurrence and extent of the variation appear to be lower in the past and lower in non-westernized groups. This methodological paper describes
several commonly-used variables that, collectively, characterize occlusal variation. Methods are described from the literature that measure the location and extent of tooth relations in all three planes of space. Our goal is that, by describing methods in a single source, it will pique the interest of dental researchers to collect these data, so that the space-time distributions of occlusal variations can be known in more detail.