Introduction: Teeth development occurs from birth to the age of 22years, with the
eruption of the wisdom teeth. Orthopantomography is one of the radiography exams most
used in odonto- stomatatology for it enables clinicians to have a global view of the teeth
development as well as the morphology of the maxilla and the mandibule. Various au-thors’
works led to the conclusion that adjoining orthopantomographic radiograph to the clinical
examination could enable an early detection of underlying developmental, tumoral, carious and
jaw bone pathologies which could not be seen or suspected during the clinical examination.
One of such studies brought out that 47.1% of panoramic findings had not been suspected by
the clinical exam. Such results led to the use of the panoramic radiograph as a systematic
screening exam to complete the clinical exam meanwhile, Other authors still believe that the
risk/benefit ratio is very small and should continue to be considered. The aim of our
study was to evaluate the contribution of denal panoramic radiographs to the diagnosis
of non-traumatic lesions of the maxilla and mandible in subjects less than 22years of age.
Material and method: we carried out a cross sectional descriptive study on dental
panoramic radiographs of patients found in our data collection centers between February 2016
and April 2018. Data was collected and filled on a preconceived data collection sheet. Principal
data collected concerned the âge, sex, diagnosis hypothesis and radiography findings. Ail
data was then entered in to Microsoft excel, converted to SPSS pro version 20.0 for analysis
and then reported on Microsoft excel for tabulations and graph crawling. Inter examination
variation was evaluated using the Kappa coefficient. A p-value < 5% was considered
statistically significant. Results: 187 panoramic radiographs respected our inclusion criteria
amongst which 47.6% were females and 52.4% males of age range 3-21 years and mean age
of. Most of the radiography findings concerned dental developmental anomalies (36,4%),
followed by carious lesions and their complications (22%), tumorale lesions (7.5%) and
osseous lesions (7%). 36.9% of radiographical findings concerned dentition types. Most of the
pathologies were found on the mandibular except for incisor’s caries and dental agenesis.
Most dental developmental anomalies were found in patients aged 15years and most dental
caries were found in patients aged 20years, with no distinction in gender. We noted high
clinic-radiographic disagreement in most pathologies while there was high agreement in
molars’ carious lesions (96.5%) and 71.9% of radiography findings were not in light with
clinical diagnosis. Conclusion: Non traumatic pathologies are frequent in individuals aged
below 22years. The most frequent pathologies were developmental anomalies and carious
lesions. There was no difference in gender but the age groups concerned were mainly 15 years
for developmental anomalies and 20years for carious lesions. The present study reveals great
discrepancy between clinical diagnosis and panoramic radiography fmdings.