The Case Western Bolton Brush Growth Study

Center Director and Curator: Mark G. Hans DDS, MSD Email Mark Hans

Associate Director: Manish Valiathan DDS, MSD Email Manish Valiathan

Institution: Bolton Brush Growth Study Center, Case Western Reserve University

The Bolton-Brush Growth Study Center at Case Western Reserve University houses the largest and most complete human craniofacial growth study in the world, the Broadbent-Bolton Growth Study as well as the largest longitudinal growth study of the appendicular skeleton, the Brush Inquiry. Although the collection was well funded by the Bolton family from 1930 until the death of B. Holly Broadbent Sr. in 1977, other funding opportunities were limited. In 1999, B. Holly Broadbent Jr. was awarded the GAC International Corporate Center Award from the AAOF to develop an index to the collection and to preserve some of the longest longitudinal records in digital format. A searchable index to the complete collection of 4309 subjects is now available at no cost to craniofacial researchers throughout the world on this Legacy Website. On- site access to the digital collection is currently closed due to the COVID 19 pandemic. With 4309 subjects enrolled the physical radiographs take up about 200 square feet of storage space on the third floor of the Bolton Dental Building and the study casts are housed in 400 square feet of offsite storage. The entire Center measures about 700 square feet and provides research space for two full time faculty members as well as visiting researchers and graduate students.

Fortunately, the majority of the best longitudinal series of radiographs have been digitized and are available through the center. In addition, a small subset (102) of these are included in the Legacy Collection. Efforts are underway to add scans of the study casts of the 102 subjects whose radiographs are currently in the AAOF Legacy Collection.

In addition, another 4,206 series are listed here on the AAOF Legacy Collection Website. They can be reviewed by clicking the Complete Bolton Brush Center Inventory tab at the top of this page. These additional series can be searched using the Demographic Search Page. Images for these series are not available on this website. The instructions for remote access to the complete Bolton Brush Growth Study Center data are available here.