 Parents urged to take toddlers to the dentist
By Charnicia E. Huggins
NEW YORK, Mar 08 (Reuters Health) - Most parents don't bring their child to the dentist before age 3, despite pediatrician and dentist guidelines urging early dental visits, study findings suggest.
The American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry recommends that children have their first dental visit during their first year of life, while the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that first visit be at age 3.
"We are missing the opportunity to identify those children who are at high risk for dental cavities prior to them developing serious dental problems," lead study author Dr. Rebecca L. Slayton, an assistant professor of pediatric dentistry at the University of Iowa, told Reuters Health. "We are also missing an opportunity to educate parents about how dental disease can be prevented in their young children."
Slayton and her colleagues followed a group of children from birth to age 3 years, determining how often they visited the dentist and had fluoride treatments. Parents completed regular questionnaires starting from when their child was 6 weeks old.
Overall, parental reports of dental visits and fluoride treatments were few, but increased as their child got older, Slayton and her colleagues report in a recent issue of Pediatric Dentistry.
For example, 2% of parents reported that their child had seen a dentist by his or her first birthday, 11% said their child had seen a dentist by his or her second birthday, and 31% said their child saw a dentist by 3 years of age.
Fluoride treatments during dental visits were rare until children reached 32 months of age, the report indicates. Roughly 4 in 10 children who visited the dentist at 32 months received a fluoride treatment, up from 4% of children who visited the dentist at 24 months.
"It is unclear why so few young children had fluoride treatments at their dental visit," Slayton said. "It may be due to the child's behavior at the visit or because the dentist determined that a fluoride treatment was not necessary for that particular child."
Mothers with a college degree, in comparison to those with a high school education, were more likely to bring their children to the dentist at an early age. And parents in the highest and lowest annual income brackets--above $50,000 or below $20,000--were more likely to bring their children to the dentist than their middle-income peers.
This latter finding may be because many middle-income families earn too much money to qualify for federal or state aid, but too little to have private dental insurance, the authors suggest.
"Dental cavities are preventable if the behaviors and other risk factors that cause them can be identified early," Slayton said. "We have a number of ways to detect early risks for cavities but can only do this by seeing the child.
"Parents should take their children to see a pediatric or family dentist as early as possible after teeth have started to erupt so that we can detect children at risk and give them guidelines for ways to prevent this disease," the researcher added.
SOURCE: Pediatric Dentistry 2002;24:64-68.
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