Insufficiency of Currently used Dental Indices in Epidemiology

Comment on Boka et al.: Dental caries and oral health-related factors in a sample of Greek preschool children

“…A search for the term ''caries prevalence '' reveals 11,196 entries in PubMed (10.1.2014). The real prevalence is completely unknown, as we recently reported (Larmas and Mäkinen 2014).…”

The Challenge of Measuring Caries Disease in Populations

“…In epidemiology, a patient has one or more diseases, while the rest of the population is healthy. The sick individuals correspond to the number of cases [18].…”

“…It means that will be checked whether each tooth is diseased or not, by adding the tooth that has the disease at the time of examination (caries lesions) with the teeth that have been affected by it in the past and have been extracted or restored. However, it may be misleading to consider the teeth restored and absent as experience of caries because the teeth may have been restored or extracted for other reasons [18].…”

“…Limits and deficiencies of DMF have been reported in the literature, some authors point out the need to use new methods that measure caries disease in populations in a way that is more in agreement with new concepts of cariology and epidemiology, including non-cavitated enamel lesions and using an individual unit of measure [18,25]. Given the importance of measuring caries in populations, studies are needed to assist researchers in the choices among the various methods.…”

Estudio epidemiológico de la salud bucodental antes y después de una instrucción preventiva en una población militar (2006-2015)

“…La valoración de la presencia de caries se suele realizar a través del índice CAO-D. Sin embargo, está fundamentado el hecho de que los análisis comparativos basados en este índice presentan varios puntos débiles 189 . Así, nos encontramos con diferentes demografías, la falta de una visión homogénea para todos los exploradores o falta de uniformidad en las mismas condiciones de la exploración, por citar tres ejemplos [190][191][192] .…”