Exploring the relationship between Body-Mass-Index-for-Age and Cervical-Vertebral-Maturation of Adolescents

Methods: After obtaining human research ethics approval (RA/4/1/5272), a retrospective study was conducted on the demographic information and cervical vertebral maturation of 319 orthodontic adolescent patients aged 10-15 years old who were seen in a public teaching hospital between 2000 and 2011. Variables from the data were analysed using both univariate and multivariate regression. The principal multivariate technique to determine which predictors had an impact on CVMS was ordinal logistic regression. Variables that were significant at a 5% significance level were retained in the final model. Adjusted odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated for this model.

Results: Ordinal logistic regression revealed that after adjusting for age and gender, BMI-for-age was associated with higher CVMS (p=0.0087). Compared to underweight participants (BMI-for-age percentile<5), those with standard weight (5-84th percentile) were associated with higher CVMS (OR 4.389; 95% CI: 1.846-10.435), as were overweight (85-94th percentile, OR: 3.28; 95% CI: 1.24-8.677) and obese patients (≥95th percentile, OR: 3.526; 95% CI: 1.104-11.268). The analysis indicated that there was no significant association between participant’s race/ethnicity and CVMS

Conclusions: After adjusting for age and gender, higher BMI-for age percentiles is associated with higher CVMS of adolescents