2010 Volume 60 Issue 5 Pages 569-574
Elementary as well as junior and senior high schools in Japan have school dentists, who employ preventive measures and offer health guidance against oral diseases. However, school dentists sometimes need the help of other dentists for dental health checkups at schools, and examination standards for oral diseases may be lacking. It may be difficult to carry out dental checkups at schools, since dentists often have to examine the oral cavities of seated students under poor-lighting conditions. The aim of this study was to evaluate examination errors in a dental health checkup at a school, using data from a checkup in a secondary school of Hiroshima Prefecture. As a result, the number of DF teeth decreased in 306 of all 1,075 cases. However, this reduced number of DF teeth might be mostly caused by examination errors concerning F teeth, and less so by those of D teeth. In addition, it was suggested that a small percentage were not advised to undergo additional examination in the dental office when such advice would have been appropriate. Namely, the pseudo-negative rate might be only a few percent in this study. There is no screening without pseudo-negatives. Therefore, the dental checkup performed in this study might be adequate as a screening method.
