Traumatic injuries to anterior teeth in Italian schoolchildren: prevalence and risk factors

In the present study, the prevalence of traumatic injuries to anterior teeth in 824, 6- to 11-year-old, schoolchildren from Rome (Italy) and the relationship between injuries and predisposing factors were evaluated. Prevalence value of the study-population was 20.26%. This value is higher than those reported in surveys performed in Italian emergency dental services, but it is similar to those of retrospective studies from other countries. The highest prevalence was found among 9-year-old boys (33.69%); the M/F ratio was 1.64. The percentage of injuries with unknown cause (21.46%) was higher than that of other studies. This may be because most of injuries were slight (64.39% of injuries were enamel fractures) and it is likely that children and their parents were not worried about them, when they happened, so that they did not seek urgent dental care-this helps to explain the prevalence values of this and other retrospective studies, which are higher than those from emergency services-and, when interviewed, they did not remember the circumstances of the traumatic event. Using the Mantel-Haenszel's Odds Ratios stratified for age and sex, injuries were related to individual predisposing factors (overjet larger than 3 mm: OR = 2.57, p = 0.0001, short upper lip: OR = 2.23, p = 0.0001 and upper medial incisor protrusion: OR = 3.95, p = n.s.), but not to children's trauma predisposing behaviour (OR = 0.92, p = n.s.). Serious injuries, however, happened to children without predisposing factors and were caused by strong impacts, suggesting that individual risk factors may not affect these type of injuries.