ИСТИНА

The first year of life is a crucial period of craniofacial growth during which most of the main individual and racial features of the facial skeleton are formed. But these important growth changes are still relatively poorly described due to bad preservation of skulls of children of this age in archeological skeletal samples, absence of this age cohort in X-ray longitudinal studies as well as rarity of appropriate CT data. Importantly, quantitative description of growth trends expressed as “normal values” of craniofacial measurements in 3D is lacking. In the present study more than one hundred CT scans of boys and girls of the first year of life were digitized to produce numerical values and growth curves for 30 linear measurements of the mid-face. The children are skeletally normal patients of several hospitals in Moscow, Kaluga and Lipetsk, most of the subjects are ethnically Russians. Slice thickness of the scans ranges from 0,3 to 1,5 mm. 40 landmarks were being placed on 3D surface reconstructions by the first author and their coordinates were further converted into linear distances between the landmarks. In order to construct growth curves the sample was divided into four age groups (newborns, 1-2 months, 3-6 months and 7-11 months) separately for each sex as to account for sexual dimorphism as well. Reliability of our data has been additionally confirmed by very good congruence of our results and those obtained previously on forensic material. The results numerically describe main ontogenetic trends of this period of ontogeny such as slow growth of the upper face in height and length compared to width, very rapid vertical orbital expansion, relatively subtle changes in nasal and mid-facial protrusion. But the study also provides more detailed picture of growth processes and interplay between different mid-facial structures.