Prevalence of dental caries among 5-year-olds reported in recent papers

Abstract

Objectives: The aim of this review was to summarize the information on the prevalence and severity of early childhood caries (ECC) in 5-year-old children in different countries reported in recent publications. Methods: Two independent reviewers performed a systematic literature search to identify papers published in English in the period of January 2013 to December 2017. The databases searched were MEDLINE, ISI Web of Science and Scopus, and MeSH key words ‘Dental Caries’ AND ‘Child, Preschool’ were used. The inclusion criteria were journal articles on epidemiological survey reporting on the caries status of the primary dentition of 5-year-old children using the dmft index. Abstracts and review papers were excluded. The Human Development Index (HDI) of the survey site was extracted from the United Nations website. Quality of the included articles was evaluated using the modified Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. Results: A total of 2,410 publications were identified and 37 articles on epidemiological surveys were included in this review. All articles had moderate or good methodological quality. One survey was conducted in Africa (Sudan), twenty in Asia (China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Nepal and Thailand), seven in Europe (Greece, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy), two in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and Turkey), one in Oceania (Australia) and six in South America (Brazil). Twenty-eight surveys were conducted in countries with high or very high HDI, and only one was in a country with low HDI. The prevalence of ECC found in these surveys ranged from 23% to 90%, and most of them (26/37) were higher than 50%. The mean dmft score varied from 0.9 to 7.5. The ten surveys reporting the highest mean dmft scores were all from Asia. Conclusions: The prevalence of ECC among 5-year-old children reported in recent papers was high, particularly in surveys conducted in Asia.