Diagnosis of dental caries in children: relation between clinical findings and parents’ perception

BACKGROUND : dental caries is a multifactorial disease that is one of the most common chronic diseases in the world. OBJECTIVE : the aim of this study was to assess the level of knowledge of parents/guardians about the presence of dental caries in their children and additionally evaluate the association between the perception with caries diagnosis obtained by clinical examination. METHODS : a cross-sectional study, pilot type, was conducted with a sample of 38 children aged between 3 and 12 years attended in the School of Dentistry, Department of Pediatric Dentistry, in the southern state of Ceara, Brazil. Through the questionnaire were collected informations about the perceptions of parents/guardians for presence of caries in children as well as sociodemographic characteristics of the family. The diagnosis of caries was evaluated through clinical examination performed by two examiners previously trained and calibrated in ICDAS-II and PUFA contents. The analyses of frequency distribution were performed.In addition, Chi-square test, Fisher’s exact test, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Pearson correlation were used for statistical analysis. RESULTS : the prevalence of dental caries was 78.9%. There was a statistically significant association between the presence of caries assessed by ICDAS-II index and low perception of dental caries reported by parents / guardians (p=0.025). However, there was strong correlation between “number of teeth in children cavitation” and “number of teeth with caries reported by parents” (r=0.605). CONCLUSION : The prevalence of dental caries was high and parents/persons responsible tended to not recognize initial stages of the disease. However, early recognition increased when the the child had a greater number of dental caries.