16/03/2025
Fact or Fiction...? 🤔 Midline diastemas must always be 1mm or smaller in order to be aesthetic.
To pick this apart, we have to take a little side step out of dentistry and consider the impact that economics has on education, research and literature. It doesn't take long to see that the literature in some cases can be skewed to a particular population at that detriment of another due to these factors. That literature eventually becomes the standard in text books, and we at some point in our careers learn it by rote.
So what does the literature actually say? Is there really a one-size fits all solution to diastemas, or are there gaps in the evidence?
Fortunately, the answer is no! Interestingly in this scenario, there is evidence to support that the 1mm or less rule is not always the case (in particular in a Black West African population). Sadly, even though there are literature reviews and meta-analysis on the topic, this data often doesn't make the cut due lack of rigour in the study design and therefore it gets missed out and not discussed. So this time we reverse engineered the study 😉 to make sure the next time someone does a review on this topic, they will have to talk about racial and cultural variation. And the gap between the textbooks and what is culturally acceptable is bigger than you think...
You can read my research at BDJ Open for free:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11836327/
