Assessment of palatal rugae patterns in pre and post orthodontic treatment casts

Objective: To study the palatal rugae patterns of the subjects taking into account, the pre and post orthodontic treatment (extraction cases) dental casts.
Materials and methods: Pre-treatment and post- treatment dental casts of 120 patients (60 males and 60 females) with the age group of above 18 years are studied, to assess the palatal rugae in terms of their number, length and shape or pattern. Measurement of rugae is done with its starting edge at the mid-palatine raphe and length of the rugae is measured based on Lysell’s classification,1955. Group comparison was done using independent Student paired test/ Mann-Whitney test at the P < .05 level.
Results: During pre-treatment, the right side of palate had predominantly divergent (41.2 %) followed by wavy (21.2 %) pattern, and left side of palate had predominantly wavy (32.8 %) followed by divergent (26.6 %) pattern. However, on the right side, divergent pattern was more among females (42.8 %) than males (39.7 %). On the left side, wavy pattern was more among males (34.3 %) than females (31.3 %). Males had a higher latero-medial dimension than females on the left side of the palate that was statistically significant (P < .001). It was observed that females had a statistically significant (P < .01) higher antero-posterior palatal dimension and males had a statistically significant (P < .001) higher latero-medial dimension on the left side of the palate. Total samples showed the right side of the antero-posterior dimension had significantly higher scores in both pre-operative (p = .004) and post –operative period (P = .006) respectively. There was no statistically significant differences on the left side of the palate.
Conclusions: Palatal rugae patterns remain constant throughout one’s life although there can be dimensional changes seen in them. Divergent pattern is the most predominant of all rugae patterns on the right side in both the genders and wavy pattern is predominant on the left side of the palate. The number of divergent rugae are more in females and the wavy pattern are higher in males. Male population has higher changes in the antero-posterior dimensions between pre and post treatment whereas the latero-medial dimensions are higher in the post-treatment group considering the total samples.