Dental Caries Prevention

There has been a recent increase in the prevalence of caries in children worldwide indicating the need for a simple and effective preventative dental program. Research methods to enable identification of high-risk children should be a matter of high priority for the dental profession. The successful development of an actual technology for caries risk prediction could have broad implications for the delivery of dental health care serving the population.

A basic goal in dentistry is to prevent the onset of disease and its further development. An ideal way to accomplish this goal would be to concentrate most available resources on those individuals or groups of individuals that are more likely to develop a disease. Identifying these risk factors is mandatory for primary prevention. There are three dimensions related to the concept of risk: occurrence of disease, population-based denominator, and time. Risk indicators are the variables associated with a disease. They can be useful to recognize and identify high-risk groups. On the other hand, risk factors are certain factors associated with an increased possibility of an individual developing a specific disease.
Subsequently multiple factors were included in the models, reflecting the multifactor etiology of the disease and increasing the sensitivity of these tests. The developed models differ in the predictors used, in the design, the age of the children involved, and the duration of the study. Research in dental caries prediction has not resulted in a universal prediction model. What has developed is a group of models with specific goals that are moderately successful in predicting dental caries for specific populations. This is why when caries risk assessment models are reviewed it is difficult to select the "best"