• Journal of the korean academy of Pediatric Dentistry
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.563-575
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in craniofacial characteristics of professional sportsmen who have practiced since their prepubertal periods. From the standardized lateral and P-A cephalograms of 137 sportsmen, 7 angular, 19 linear, 4 ratio, and 2 index measurements were measured and evaluated by means of statistical methods. The samples were divided into three groups: Group 1; ice hockey(n=17), foot-ball(n=27), basketball(n=16) Group 2; baseball(n=16), gymnastics(n=13), and Group 3; judo(n=18), ssireum(n=10), weight lift(n=20). The results were as follows: It seemed obvious that the cephalic indices of the 3 groups exhibited brachycephalic headform (Group 1; $0.85{\pm}0.04$, Group 2; $0.84{\pm}0.04$, Group 3; $0.83{\pm}0.06$) and there was no statistical difference among the groups (p>0.05). The facial indices of the Group 1 ($0.93{\pm}0.05$) and Group 2 ($0.93{\pm}0.04$) exhibited definite leptoprosopic facial forms while the Group 3 ($0.90{\pm}0.04$) showed more or less euryprosopic facial form, and there appeared significant difference between the Group 1 and 3 (p<0.05), and also between the Group 2 and 3 (p<0.05). There appeared strong relationships between the facial indices and the facial axis angle, mandibular plane angle, total craniofacial height, total facial height, upper anterior dental height, lower anterior dental height, mandibular length, lower anterior facial height ratio, and especially with lower anterior facial height (p<0.001). It seemed that most of the vertical facial measurements of the Group 1 and 2 appeared to be larger than those of the Group 3.