Experience of dental caries and its effects on early dental occlusion: a descriptive study

Describe the occurrence of dental caries in a sample of pre-school children and school children, aged 3 and 12, and study the possible association between caries and malocclusion.

We selected and analyzed the medical records of a sample of 588 patients who had their first dental examination at the Pediatric Dentistry Unit, Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Sciences of Policlinico Umberto I, "Sapienza" University of Rome.

In the sample, 55.4% of the children had no decayed deciduous elements, while 44.6% had at least one decayed deciduous element. The prevalence of decayed permanent teeth was 10.2%, while 89.8% had no decayed permanent teeth. In the sample, 9.4% of the children showed advanced carious lesions, that needed tooth extraction and 6.6% needed a space maintainer for post-extractive interceptive treatment. In the sample, 26.7% of the examined patients had increased overjet, while 3.7% had decreased overjet and 25.4% of the sample had an increased overbite, 11, 2% had reduced over-bite values. A percentage over 10% of the sample had an anterior openbite in centric occlusion. The prevalence of posterior crossbite among entire samples was 19.8%.

Although the incidence of caries disease was high in the selected samples, the study did not show a statistically significant association between caries and clinical orthodontic abnormalities, except for the association between the midline deviation and the severe carious diseases, necessitating extraction.