Tsuneko Ogino

Application of aspartic acid racemization to forensic odontology: Post mortem designation of age at death

The extent of racemization of aspartic acid in the dentin of healthy, carious and impacted teeth was used to define the ages of individuals at the time of their death. These determinations were performed with an error of +/- 4 years. This method holds the promise of simplifying procedures in, and extending the application of forensic odontology. The current error range of this method may be reduced by analyzing teeth of the same positional types from deceased individuals of known age. Using this method, it appears that post mortem preservation of up to 10 years has a negligible effect on the values determined for the age of individuals at death.

A Case of Psvchorenic Halitosis Referred to Psychiatry

We have been working on the treatment of self-perceived halitosis for 6 years. Self-perceived halitosis can be caused by either psychosomatic or psychiatric disorders. In most cases, brief psychotherapy is very effective for psychosomatic disorder, but not for psychiatric disorder. For psychiatric patients, we emphasize the importance of psychiatric treatment, however, patients generally refuse to be treated by psychiatrist because they would rather believe it is halitosis than a psychiatric disorder. In this report, we described a case of a psychiatric patient (a 64-year-old woman) who understood the necessity of psychiatric treatment and finally accepted it.

Study on the care of halitosis patients

This paper descrived the study on the care of patient of self halitosis . Firstly, we asked to make halitosis patient answer our questionnaires which included psychological factor . We ref ered the results of them to check the oral psychosomatic disorders of the patients when they were interviewed in our clinic. We would like to propose the utility of the questionnaires check list with regard to the psychosomatic approach and detailed our psychotherapy , which was based on the relationship of the doctor-patient.