Abstract

Background: Caries risk assessment is the determination of the likelihood of the incidence of new carious lesions. Individualized risk assessment of an infant or toddler will help both the health care provider and parent/caregiver to identify the factors associated with early childhood caries, so that a preventive plan can be developed.

Aim: To compare three different caries risk assessment tools, Caries-risk Assessment Tool (CAT), Caries Management by Risk Assessment (CAMBRA) and Cariogram^® for children with/without Early Childhood Caries (ECC).

Methods: A prospective comparative study design comprising of 44 children under 71 months of age and diagnosed with/without ECC were included. Oral examination to record oral hygiene score and dmft was done followed by saliva collection to estimate flow rate, pH, buffering capacity and microbial analysis. Unpaired ‘t’ test was used for statistical analysis.

Results: CAT assessed 90.9% of the subjects and CAMBRA assessed 45.5% of the subjects as having high risk of developing dental caries thereby overestimating caries risk, whereas Cariogram^® estimated 59.1% of subjects as having high risk after a comprehensive evaluation.

Conclusion: CAT and CAMBRA overestimated caries risk whereas Cariogram^® evaluated caries risk appropriately.

Keywords: Caries Risk Assessment; Cariogram; CAMBRA; CAT; ECC

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Citation

Citation: Nessa Mary John and Latha Anandakrishna. “Comparative Evaluation of 3 Caries Risk Assessment Tools for Children with Early Childhood Caries”. Acta Scientific Dental Sciences 4.9 (2020): 150-154.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Nessa Mary John and Latha Anandakrishna. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.