Background: The Mandibular Foramen (MF) is an important anatomical structure during procedures such as anesthesia of the inferior alveolar nerve during dental and maxillofacial surgery. Many authors have shown that it is essential to know the morphometric characteristics of MF because the inferior alveolar nerve which passes through it could be damaged in dental practice or explain an anesthesia failure during dental treatment. Our objective is to determine the morphometric characteristics of the mandibular foramen and to determine their implications in anesthesiology in a sample of the Cameroonian population.
Materials and methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study of craniofacial scans of a sample of individuals from the Cameroonian population. The CTscans were obtained from the database of the radiology and medical imaging .
Departments of the Yaoundé Central Hospital and the Cathedral medical center. We collected socio-demographic data and 05 dependent variables on 210 hemi mandibles (distance from the MF to the anterior edge, to the posterior edge, to the mandibular notch, to the basilar rim and to the molar occlusal plane). Student’s t test was used for data analysis with a significance level P<0.05.
Results: In total, it was 105 CT of the craniofacial mass of Cameroonian subjects, i.e., 74.2% of men and 25.8% of women. The MF was bilateral in all of our participants in our survey and positioned 19.4 mm from the anterior edge of the mandible in men and 19.2 mm in women. In our sample, 25.8% of subjects presented a left accessory mandibular foramen.
Conclusion: The MF delivers passage to the inferior alveolar nerve which is called upon during anesthesia by trunk block. This study showed differences in the location of the mandibular foramen with measurements taken in Caucasian individuals.
