Objectives: The present study aimed to evaluate the minerals content, calcium (Ca) and phosphorus (P) weight percent of primary teeth enamel in dependence to finger print pattern.
Materials and methods: Thirty primary teeth (10 for each finger print pattern: whorl, loop and arch group). Enamel slab from each tooth was obtained, embedded and scanned by Scanning Electron Microscope - Energy Dispersive Analytic X-ray. Then the minerals weight percent of Ca and P from three different enamel areas (outer, middle, and inner) as well as the minerals content of enamel in relation to the three finger print patterns were quantified. One-way ANOVA test was used to compare among the three finger print patterns and the three enamel areas. Post- Hoc Tukey test was used for multiple comparisons and p value ≤ 0.05 was considered to be statistically significant.
Results: The loop pattern has statistically significant higher weight percent of Ca followed by arch then whrol pattern, the arch pattern has the highest weight percent of P followed by loop then whrol pattern and the differences were statistically significant (p≤ 0.05). The highest weight percent of minerals (Ca + P) was observed in outer enamel area of loop pattern while the lowest percent was found in middle area of whrol pattern (53.860 ± 0.686 vs 51.600 ± 1.442). Regardless finger print pattern, there were no significant differences in Ca and P among the three enamel areas (p > 0.05).
Conclusions: There were dependent differences observed in the three finger print patterns, Ca weight percent was the highest in loop pattern while phosphorus was the highest in arch pattern. However, no area dependent differences were observed in the three enamel areas.