A school dental examination not only clarifies the dental health condition of an entire population in a school, but can provide a good opportunity to give dental health education to young children as well, if its results are fully used as health guidelines for individual children. In a conventional school dental examination, however only the existence and degree of dental caries are, determined, and the necessity of dental treatment children are automatically informed of the according to the results. It cannot be said under such circumstances that school dental examinations are effectively utilized to provide dental health education to children in their for mative years.
One reason for this is that early detection and early treatment of dental caries are so strongly emphasized that all dental caries are subjected to treatment, even through caries involvement is very slight. Another reason is that it is still unclear to what extent mild dental caries in young children progresses, or remains in the same state.
With this in mind, we determined changes in the state of slight caries in permanent teeth over one year through school dental examinations for the purpose of evaluating the criteria of instructions used for effective health guidelines and education. As a result, it was revealed that 53.6% of dental caries as mild as C1 were retained without progression for a year. This suggested that there is a possibility of risk of advising unnecessary treatment in many cases whenever all dental caries are automatically included in the cases requiring treatment.
