Abstract
Japanese children still have a lot of dental caries at twelve years of age. Manpower and resources are not safficient to promote a preventive program of dental caries for school children. If we can predict high-risk caries groups early, it will be possible to control dental caries of school children efficiently.
We analyzed the relationships between DMF teeth in 12-year-olds and the factors concerning the dental caries onset of first permanent molars. Then we made equations for predicting caries highrisk groups early by the multiple regression analysis and the discriminant analysis.
The results were as follows.
1) The degree of caries prevalence of the first permanent molars was in accordance with that of the decay at the neighboring second deciduous molars.
2) The degree of the decay at deciduous second molars and the number of deciduous teeth caries were significantly related to DMF teeth in 12-year-olds.
3) A multiple regression analysis using eight variables showed that we could get an equation with a much higher multiple correlation coefficient.
4) The predictive equation for discriminating the high-risk caries group which had 5 or more DMF teeth at the age of 12 worked very correctly.
5) The equation using two or three variables was worse than eight variables in ability of prediction, but it was nevertheless useful.
