An Epidemiological Study to Establish a Relationship between Teenagers' Decayed, Missing, Filled Teeth and Sugar Consumption

Abstract

A clear relationship between gross sugar consumption and the number of dental caries cases has been found out by many workers. However, this kind of information does not help the activities of dentists or nutritionists toward the prevention of dental caries. A practical strategy to this requires detail information on the amount of sugar consumption due to the specific food eaten by a given group.
In this paper, Decayed, Missing, Filled Teeth (DMF) and sugar consumption are related through food and dental surveys of 1058 boys and 1597 girls belonging to different age groups in junior and senior high schools.
Findings obtained are as follows:
(1) The girls' mean DMF increases sharply and consistently with age. The mean DMF of boys does not increase so sharply as girls but comes to flat at an age of the first year of the senior high school.
(2) In the same age group, the sugar intake of girls from soft drinks and sweets is much higher than that of the boys. This may be one of the main reasons why the mean DMF of girls is larger than that of boys. Therefore, dentists or nutritionists should take more efforts to improve food practice of girls.