Journal vol.6 no.1 abstract1 of The Japan Health Care Dental Association

The Journal of The Japan Health Care Dental Association Vol.6 No.1, 2004
abstract

Ataru Itou

The information obtained from caries risk assessment is very important and useful. However, the methods to predict at the chair side what a level of importance each parameter has or how much degree of risk individual patient risk means have not been established yet.
The caries risk assessment close to the first medical examination is thought to have the significance as a guideline of risk improvement, but the information obtained in the maintenance phase is required to have a role of "the predictive factor of caries lesion occurrence" Then, we analyzed the medical care data of his patients with the expectation that the cavity occurrence in the patients under maintenance could be predicted. 63 study subjects were chosen from his patients who were aged from 5 to 12-year-old at the time of examination and received his maintenance over 3 years. 9 subjects of them were found to show the increase of DMFT score within 3 years after the first examination. We assessed the caries predictability of each examination value by comparing the pretest probability with positive and negative values. This assessment shows that the parameter whose positive predictive value goes up higher than pretest probability and comes down lower when a parameter value is negative works effectively as caries risk prediction. It also shows that a single parameter has increased its risk predictability when it was combined with other single risk predictable parameter.