 Background The upper labial frenum is a normal anatomic structure with inherent morphological difference. Frenum has variations depending upon the attachment of fibers along with the presence of structural variations. Diastema is a space between teeth. The most often is maxillary midline diastema between upper central incisors. One of the main causes of diastema is enlarged upper lip frenulum attachment.  Aim To evaluate the prevalence of frenal attachment among males and females and to assess the relation of frenum attachment with diastema  Materials and Methods This cross sectional study was conducted on 100 subjects of both males and females within the age group of 18-60 years, attending a tertiary care hospital in Mangalore city. Intra oral examination was done to evaluate the variations in frenum and photographs were taken. Descriptive statistics, including frequencies and percentages was applied using SPSS Version 17.0.  Results The most prevalent frenii were the simple frenum (64% ) and frenum with appendix (19%). It was found that mucosal type of frenum was the most prevalent type among males while females exhibited more of papillary penetrating and frenum with appendix. The percentage of diastema exhibited by papillary penetrating type of frenal attachment (100%) was more compared to other simple frenum. Though frenum with appendix and frenum with nodule were more common among the aberrant types, the prevalence of diastema was found to be less in both compared to other aberrant types. Aberrant frenal attachments were more common among females than males in our study.  Conclusion It is apparent that that proper identification of various frenal variations is important and need to be addressed. The dentist thus needs to give due importance for frenum assessment during oral examination.

Keywords : Abberant frenum, Frenal attachment, Diastema.