[Clinical assessment of caries prevention and management]

Dental caries is a common chronic oral disease of tooth with multiple factor involvement. It has the characteristics of high incidence, low rate of treatment and high rate of retreatment. How to further improve the standardized treatment and management of dental caries has become a clinical problem. Hence, clinical difficulty assessment system of caries prevention and management is established on the base of caries diagnosis and classification. This system mainly includes caries risk assessment and caries treatment evaluation and can provide effective basis for caries management. This review article discusses caries diagnosis and classification, caries risk assessment and caries treatment difficulty assessment, which are the most important parts of caries management in the whole life cycle.