What is serial extraction?
Serial extraction or the guidance of eruption is an age-old procedure to correct crowded jawarch. It involves the correctly timed, planned removal of certain deciduous and permanent teeth in mixed dentition stage with dentoalveolar disproportion in order to

• Alleviate crowding of incisor teeth
• Allow unerupted teeth to guide themselves into proper positions
• Lessen (or eliminate) the period orthodontic appliance therapy.
• Reduce the complexity of further orthodontic therapy treatment, if required.

Why serial extraction is needed?
Crowding is encountered at various stages of teeth development and in varying degrees of severity. In the early dentition stage, crowding takes place due to the difference in the size of the permanent tooth to their deciduous or primary tooth.
Management of crowding in the mixed dentition phase of a child can be done earliest with serial extraction. Early management of improper alignment of teeth is also known as interceptive orthodontics, where the fault is corrected before it becomes more complex.

How many teeth need to be removed in serial extraction treatment?
Depending upon the severity pedodontist will decide the sequence, the most followed sequence is the removal of deciduous canines and first deciduous molars followed by timely reassessment.

Can the crowding of teeth in a growing child resolve on its own?
The answer to this question depends on several factors, considering them we can choose to observe or intervene at the right time to make space available for the eruption of permanent teeth.

• Spacing between the primary teeth, which will help in accommodating the bigger
  erupting permanent teeth properly.
• The inclination of front teeth/ incisors which may help in increasing jaw arch
  circumference.
• The ratio of the size between the permanent and primary teeth will give an indication as
  to whether adequate space will be available for an uneventful eruption of permanent
  teeth.

BENEFITS OF SERIAL EXTRACTION

• Reducing or eliminating the need for further complex treatmentCrowding causes individual tooth position problems of rotation, tipping and overlapping. These
  problems are solvable with fixed appliance therapy, but the treated positions may be more
  difficult to stabilize even with long term retention. It is much better to have the teeth erupt into
  relatively correct positions on their own, which planned serial extraction can do, thereby
  reducing later treatment time in braces.
•  Less tissue damage, better stabilityTeeth erupting into very crowded positions can suffer gingival tissue damage such as recession
  or can be damaged by unusual angles of wear. Serial extraction not only enhances the stability
  of the final product, but it may also prevent irreversible tissue damage to teeth.