The American Association of Orthodontists Foundation (AAOF) Legacy 300 Campaign has raised $1.5 million to create the AAOF Craniofacial Growth Legacy Collection.
Donors include members of the American Association of Orthodontists (AAO), orthodontic industry representatives, friends of the specialty, orthodontic study clubs, and orthodontic alumni groups, according to the organization.
The AAOF Craniofacial Legacy Growth Collection will preserve representative samples dating back more than 75 years of irreplaceable longitudinal craniofacial growth records of approximately 1,000 children and adolescents who did not have orthodontic treatment. Many of the older records are deteriorating due to the normal breakdown of radiographic images. The complete sets of growth records are now in collections that are the property of a number of U.S. and Canadian universities.
The existing collections of growth records serve as the basis of most of the information in contemporary orthodontic literature on craniofacial growth in children who did not have orthodontic treatment. The subjects studied were measured annually from as young as age 2, and continuing in many cases until the mid-20s, producing a rich longitudinal record of craniofacial development among children who did not receive orthodontic treatment. Orthodontic residents and researchers regularly tap these materials for investigational purposes.
The records to be preserved through digitizing include lateral and frontal cephalograms, hand-wrist films, dental radiographs, study casts, and written records on the subjects' physical development. The database now has more than 2,000 lateral cephalograms from nine collections, representing more than 200 cases.
