Experience of dental caries and its effects on early dental occlusion: a descriptive study.

Aim: Describe the occurrence of dental caries in a sample of pre-school children and school children, aged 3 and 12, and study the possible association between caries and malocclusion. Methods: We selected and analyzed the medical records of a sample of 588 patients who had their first dental examination at the Pediatric Dentistry Unit, Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Sciences of Policlinico Umberto I, “Sapienza” University of Rome. Results: In the sample, 55.4% of the children had no decayed deciduous elements, while 44.6% had at least one decayed deciduous element. The prevalence of decayed permanent teeth was 10.2%, while 89.8% had no decayed permanent teeth. In the sample, 9.4% of the children showed advanced carious lesions, that needed tooth extraction and 6.6% needed a space maintainer for post-extractive interceptive treatment. In the sample, 26.7% of the examined patients had increased overjet, while 3.7% had decreased overjet and 25.4% of the sample had an increased overbite, 11, 2% had reduced overbite values. A percentage over 10% of the sample had an anterior openbite in centric occlusion. The prevalence of posterior crossbite among entire samples was 19.8%. Conclusions: Although the incidence of caries disease was high in the selected samples, the study did not show a statistically significant association between caries and clinical orthodontic abnormalities, except for the association between the midline deviation and the severe carious diseases, necessitating extraction.