Avaliação de risco à cárie em lactentes e crianças em idade préescolar e validação de um formulário simplificado de avaliação de risco

Abstract

The scientific knowledge about the etiology of dental caries and the employment of models that aim at promoting health have contributed to the decline of the disease. However, the tooth decay in very young children, called tooth early in childhood (ECC) continues to be the most common chronic childhood disease. As the health-sickness process stems from several factors, what is seen is the polarization of ECC, where a small portion of the population concentrates high levels of injuries of caries. Considering the need to control the etiological factors of the disease and not its sequels, the assessment of the risk for dental caries is an essential element of clinical care for contemporary infants, children and adolescents and has received great attention in recent years. Thus, the objectives of this study were: verify the experience of caries in infants and preschool children; classify children with respect to the risk to dental caries; assess whether there was a change in caries experience and in the classification of the risk to dental caries in two moments analyzed and validate a simplified form of assessment of risk for dental caries in infants and preschool children. The design of this clinical study was observational, quantitative, descriptive analytical, cross-sectional, based on information obtained from 132 dental records of dental children aged zero to 71 months of age, of both sexes and healthy, who received dental treatment and follow-up visits between the months of February 2015 to July 2016 in clinics of pediatric dentistry, School of Dentistry of Federal University of Uberlândia. For the analysis, dental records containing at least two assessments of risk for dental caries with an interval of at least 90 days between the first and the second evaluation were included. In this study, nine risk factors were considered that formed the scale of risk identification Dental caries risk factors (DCRF-9). The data were submitted to descriptive statistical analysis and the Kruskal-Wallis test (p<0.05). The results showed that 113 (78.0%) and 86 (65.2%) children, respectively, showed no caries in the first and second evaluation and that were classified as low risk for dental caries in the first and second evaluation. There was a modification of the risk rating of 26 (19.7%) children. The sensitivity and specificity of the simplified form of assessment of risk for dental caries were 88% and 69%, respectively. The simplified form used in this study can be considered a good predictor of risk factors for dental caries, since it has high sensitivity and average/good specificity. It was possible to conclude that: most of the children had no experience of caries and were classified as low risk; there was no change in caries experience and of the risk rating of few children and that the form of risk assessment to the ECC and was able to identify the children susceptible to ECC.