How can dental records be used to identify dead bodies when they don t know who the dead person is

A. When a body needs identifying details of its teeth are published in professional magazines. The idea is that the detailed description of decay, dental work and crowns will jog a dentist's memory regarding a missing patient of theirs.

Q. Does it work

A. Response rates are relatively low and police usually have to reconstruct the whole face in the hope of prompting the public to identify the person.

Fortunately the number of unidentified bodies that offer no clue as to who they were is relatively small.

Q. So teeth aren't very useful forensic tools

A. Well yes they are. We should have up to 32 of them and there are 160 surfaces that will have received differential wear and any number of artificial modifications, which makes a set of teeth pretty unique.

The main problem is that this uniqueness also extends to dental records, which aren't standardised and can differ from dentist to dentist. This makes identifying bodies solely from dental records more problematic.

Q. Why teeth, rather than bones

A. Teeth are the most resistant material in the body when it comes to fire and decomposition: the shape and condition of human teeth can be used to identify sex, age and lifestyles from archaeological samples thousands of years old.

Also, the arrangement of the teeth is virtually unique to an individual and, if dental records can be found, they can be as useful as fingerprints.

Q. When did dental records become important for identifying bodies

A. Not until X-rays were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century was it possible to have radiographs to accompany detailed patient dental records.

But an even more recent development over the last twenty years has enhanced dental record's usefulness in identifying human remains.

Q. What development

A. Recent studies have revealed that our teeth contain an enamel, amelogenin, whose analysis can reveal the sex of its owner. Such a test on an unidentified body could slice a significant amount of time and effort from the identification process.

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by Lisa Cardy