Smile esthetics: assessment of perceived smile attractiveness as related to dental midline asymmetry

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Department of Orthodontics, Faculty of Oral and Dental Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

Esthetics is of prime concern for dental professionals as well as lay people. Thus the aim of the current study was to highlight and broaden the conception of the influential impact of maxillary midline alterations on smile and dental attractiveness. The sample constituted a panel of sixty raters; twenty orthodontists, twenty dentists and twenty laypersons for rating smile attractiveness as perceived for a series of eleven images; one with no maxillary dental to facial midline discrepancy and another ten with varying amounts of dental midline shifts which were altered for a photograph of a female subject, aged 18 years old. A 10-point numerical rating scale was prepared and drawn on the evaluation form given to the sixty raters to assign a score for each image that best corresponded to the level of perceived smile attractiveness. The collected data was statistically analyzed for descriptive statistics including means and standard deviations for the assigned attractiveness rating scores. Moreover, one way analysis of variance test was computed to compare the mean scores assigned among the different raters. It was obvious that orthodontists and dentists were more intolerable to dental midline alterations than laypersons with the orthodontists assigning lesser mean rating attractiveness scores than both dentists and laypersons. Meanwhile, a maxillary dental midline shift more than 3mm was recognized as being unattractive by all raters which bear special consideration during orthodontic treatment to substantiate physical attractiveness and subsequent social interactions.