Motivational Interviewing for Prevention of Early Childhood Caries

Early childhood caries is prevalent disease worldwide involving 1.76 billion children even though it is preventable with proper measures. Early childhood caries not only cause local discomfort but also hampers overall growth and development of child. Early childhood caries requires invasive treatments as it progress to later stages so early intervention is helpful to prevent these invasive procedures like restoration and extraction. Various procedures such as fluoride application, oral hygiene maintenance, motivational interviewing, diet counselling, oral health education programs are used for prevention, among them motivational interviewing is the emerging modality for prevention. Motivational interviewing is client centred counselling approach which elicits the behavior change by helping clients to explore and resolve ambivalence. It was first introduced for treating alcoholism now it is implemented in various fields for management of disease such as diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular diseases, reducing sexual behavior and pain management. In some of the researches it is found that the preventive measures accompanied with motivational interviewing are more effective than the conventional health education and intervention. Though there are many researches are present on the motivational interviewing in prevention of early childhood caries, better designed and reported interventions are still needed.