Orthodontic treatment need and effectiveness assess using ICON

Objectives: (1) To assess the orthodontic treatment effect need in patients that were submitted to orthodontic treatment at the department of Orthodontics of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra; (2) To evaluate the treatment effectiveness. Methods: The ICON was applied to 200 subjects and two calibrated observers evaluated the pre-treatment and post-treatment models. The results were analyzed using the IBM-SPSS v20 statistical platform. The need, complexity and outcome of the orthodontic treatment were described by means of descriptive statistics. The relationship between the complexity and the outcome of the orthodontic treatment was analyzed using a chi-square test. The statistical significance level adopted was 0.05. Results: The orthodontic treatment need meant 70% of the sample (ICON value >43). In the majority of the sample (62%), the complexity ranged between "moderate" to "very difficult". Regarding the outcome of the orthodontic treatment, none of the patients remained the same or got worse. Most of the sample (55.5%) reached the level of "great improvement". The component of upper arch crowding/spacing demonstrated the best results, followed by the aesthetic component, crossbite, anterior vertical relationship and lastly, the component of buccal segment antero-posterior relationship. Comparison between complexity and outcome of orthodontic treatment showed that the higher the complexity, the better the outcome achieved by orthodontic treatment. Conclusions: In our study, 70% of the sample needed orthodontic treatment. All of the subjects reported an improvement of their condition. (C) 2015 Sociedade Portuguesa de Estomatologia e Medicina Dentaria. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.