AJO/DO Guest Editorial

Dr. Jeff Cavanaugh

For the past five years I have had the pleasure of serving on the AAO Foundation Board as the director for the Midwestern Society of Orthodontists. Besides my time as President, the most rewarding aspect of my service has been my position as the board liaison to the Planning and Awards Review Committee (PARC).

At my first PARC meeting in January 2005 several proposals were submitted with the goal of preserving some aspect of a historical longitudinal growth study of untreated individuals at the submitting institution. In previous years other institutions had received funding as Center Awards to work on preserving the historical collection at their institution. At that meeting the members of PARC decided not to fund any of the proposals submitted that year. Instead, they recommended to the AAOF Board that the preservation of the historic collections become a funding priority, second to the support of junior faculty. As part of that recommendation, they also wanted to encourage those who had submitted proposals that year and in the past to collaborate with one another and re-submit for further consideration a more global approach to this issue.

 At their next meeting the AAOF Board approved the recommendations of PARC to make preserving the historic collections a priority of the Foundation. Two meetings were then held in May 2005 and in January 2006 to establish the criteria for the records to be preserved and digitized and issues related to how the information would be made available on the internet. With these recommendations PARC developed a call for proposals under the Center Awards category to develop a planning grant for the preservation of the historic collections. The goal of the project was to protect, digitize, and disseminate the orthodontic collections so that they could be preserved and so that clinicians and researchers could use them. These growth studies contain the work of hundreds of investigators for more than seventy-five years and contain information on children who did not receive orthodontic treatment that could never be collected again and are deteriorating because of the normal break down of radiographic images.

This special call for proposals was part of the awards program for 2007. PARC received several proposals that year, but none of them addressed all of the items that PARC believed were needed to ensure the success of the project. Plus they were looking for a truly collaborative proposal, which included participation from each of the historic collections.

Then, Dr. Mark Hans planned a meeting of all those holding a historic growth collection held in November 2007. This meeting was unprecedented in the history of orthodontics in that a representative from ten of the eleven known longitudinal growth studies met to work toward a common goal. From this meeting came a single joint proposal submitted to PARC on behalf of the ten major orthodontic legacy collections, recommended for funding by PARC, and approved by the AAOF Board.

The AAOF Board awarded this group $120,000 to begin their work. They created a web site http://www.cril.org/aaof/aaof_home.asp . that shows their work to this point. Currently on the web site are almost 900 lateral cephalograms for over 80 subjects from nine of the ten collections. I would encourage you to take a look at the web site to see what this group has accomplished in such a short period of time. Again, the collaboration on this project is unprecedented, and those involved deserve our appreciation for thinking first of the good of our profession.

Both PARC and the AAOF board have been very pleased with the progress on this project. Originally, the board had budgeted to invest another $80,000 in the second year of the project. Because of the downturn in the economy and the poor performance of the Foundation’s investments, the board has awarded the group of collaborators $44,000 to keep the project going. Estimates are to reach the goals of the project to preserve and digitize a representative sample of these legacy collections around $1 million will be needed. To raise these funds, the AAOF is looking for a few sizeable donations to reach this $1 million goal. Those who might be interested in supporting this project can contact Mr. Robert Hazel at the AAO Foundation or their constituent director to discuss giving options.

I would personally like to thank all those who have put so much work into this project to preserve this information that can never be replaced and is so important to our profession.