[Role of inheritability of tooth form, tooth malformation and tooth position]

A common technique to divide the influence of heredity and environment on certain characteristics, or pathologies is the one that uses twins. There are more or less complex techniques to carry out twin research, from which the most simple procedure consists of determining the amount of concordance of certain characteristics in monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins. In individuals who develop from one oocyte, like MZ twins, one would expect a correlation of 1.00 (or 100% concordance) purely from their gene-relation. DZ twins are the result of separate conceptions of the same parents and they thus differ as much from each other as ordinary brothers and sisters. The most recently developed twin-methodologies use path analysis and model fitting for the estimations of the heritabilities and environmental influences on certain characteristics. In this article it is tried to picture the genetic an environmental influence on tooth form, tooth position and occlusal characteristics with different genetic techniques. Generally it can be concluded that our genes are of utmost importance for tooth form and tooth malformations, but the environment has a much bigger impact on tooth position and occlusal parameters.