INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS OF PROFESSIONAL ASSESSMENTS IN ORTHODONTICS- PART 2 - TREATMENT OUTCOME

The opinion of 97 orthodontists in 9 countries has been surveyed with respect to the judgment of treatment outcome. Ninety-eight pretreatmen t and posttreatment study casts were examined by each orthodontist who gave a judgment of the degree of improvement and whether they thought the result was acceptable. It was found that there was at least 80% a greement on the acceptability of the outcome for only 45.5% of the sam ple. Logistic regression was used to identify predictive indicators fo r the judgment of acceptance, It was found that the posttreatment scor es for dental esthetics, crossbite, buccal segment sagittal relation, lower arch crowding, centerline, and left and right buccal segment ver tical relationship were most important predictor variables. These six traits correctly assigned the decision with 70% accuracy, The judgment of outcome did not seem to take account of the treatment complexity a s judged by the practitioners. It was also found that judgments are si gnificantly affected by the country and payment methods, practice envi ronment, and experience of the practitioner. The occlusal traits ident ified can be usefully incorporated into a index for assessing both tre atment need and outcome, and may serve the purposes for audit and rese arch in orthodontics.