Denver Growth Study: body images with scaled sketches

Objective: To gather and categorize a portion of The Denver Longitudinal Growth Study Data into a medium where it could be used to produce controls for further studies on craniofacial and skeletal growth via an electronic format. This is a sample of 313 untreated Caucasian individuals.

Introduction: Very few studies encompass the span of development that the Denver Study collected on its subjects. This research project focused centrally on data for studying skeletal growth using postural photographs from different positions and from frontal and lateral sketches. This research also has the associated cephalometric radiographs, hand/wrist radiographs, and orthodontic models for the vast majority of these subjects.

Materials and Methods: Data collected were longitudinal full body sketches and photographs from ages 1 month to 44 years.

Results: 251 subjects had postural full body photographic records (3683 photos), 127 of which were studied over a period of at least 15 years. A total of 188 subjects had body tracing records (2145 tracings), of which 123 subjects had at least 10 tracings and 111 were studied for at least 10 years. The sketches were to scale with recorded height data. The data was recorded into a format that could produce subject height-growth charts. A total of 178 subjects had both photographic and tracing records as well as 172 also having the associated cephalometric radiographs, hand/wrist radiographs, and orthodontic models.

Conclusions: This data can be matched with the corresponding radiographic and dental records for further studies on craniofacial development in correlation with skeletal growth and development. The anthropologic longitudinal data can be organized into a digital format that could reproduce the data as a 3-dimensional format of the subjects.