Perceptions of dental aesthetics in the United States and Nigeria

The standard dental aesthetic index (DAI) is an orthodontic treatment need index based on perceptions of dental aesthetics in the United States. It is a regression equation that links perceptions of the social acceptability o f dental aesthetics with the objective intraoral measurements of ten occlus al traits. For the index to be universally acceptable, the perceptions of d ental aesthetics in other countries must be similar to those of the United States. This study was designed to determine whether the perceptions of den tal aesthetics of Nigerian students are similar to those of different group s of the US population. The same 25 stimuli (photographs of dental configur ations, a subset of the 200 stimuli used in deriving the standard DAI equat ion) were rated for dental aesthetics by Nigerian students. Their ratings w ere compared with ratings of the same 25 stimuli by US parents, students an d orthodontists. Spearman rank-order correlations ranged from 0.75 to 0.84. These correlations were highly significant (P<0.0001), and showed that the perceptions of dental aesthetics of Nigerian students were very similar to those of the US groups. The study therefore concluded that standard DAI co uld be used as a screening tool and without modification in epidemiological surveys among Nigerians.