Did the Use of Minimum Interventions for Caries Management Change during the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Aim: to evaluate changes in the frequency of use of minimum interventions (MI) techniques for caries management during the COVID-19 pandemic. Materials and Methods: a questionnaire was applied through the SurveyMonkey™ platform to evaluate changes in the dentist’s frequency of use of non-invasive, micro-invasive, minimally invasive, and mixed interventions, non-aerosol, or aerosol productive, to manage dental caries before and during COVID-19 pandemic. Differences in the use of MI techniques were analyzed by Wilcoxon test and the effect size (ES) was calculated. An α = 0.05 was adopted. Results: a total of 781 dentists answered the questionnaire; most of them were female (76.4%), with 30’s (76.4%), graduated over 10-24 years ago (38%) in public dental schools (62%), graduated in southwest of Brazil (38%), that work in clinical environment (66.8%) and in private jobs (53.4%). During COVID-19, among the sample, 91 respondents were not working. In relation to the non-invasive techniques, only the use of casein phosphopeptide amorphous calcium phosphate (CPP-ACP) decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic (p<0.01; ES=0.11). The frequency of sealants to repair defective restorations were the only micro invasive technique that increased during the pandemic (p<0.01; ES=0.03). Among the minimally invasive techniques the use of atraumatic restorative treatment (ART) increased significantly (p<0.01; ES=0.06), while the use of air abrasion decreased (p=0.02; ES=0.04) during COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, non-restorative cavity control (mixed intervention) increased during pandemic period (p<0.001; ES=0.11). Conclusion: Although the results demonstrated differences in the use of some procedures, a very small magnitude of the effect was perceived, demonstrating that the influence of COVID-19 pandemic was very little, if any, in the use of MI techniques for caries management. Moreover, the use of MI strategies was already well established between Brazilian dentists before the pandemic period.