2016 Volume 54 Issue 1 Pages 22-30
Recently, several reports have indicated that the prevalence and severity of dental caries in Japanese children are showing decreasing trends. As a result, the chief complaint of patients being treated in the pediatric dental field has changed to such conditions as prevention of dental caries, malocclusion, dental trauma, and surgical treatment. In the present study, we analyzed information obtained at the first examination of new patients seen in the recent 4-year period, including chief complaint, sex,age, address, date, and reason for referral from another clinic. Those findings were compared with the records of patients treated in the prior 30-year period. The following results were obtained.
1.The chief complaint showed a tendency to be related to patient age.
2.Dental caries showed the highest prevalence of all chief complaints. However, most of those patients were referred from other special needs pediatric dentistry care institutions because of difficul ties with treating at a younger age.
3.As for the number of patients by age, the peak was 2-3 years old in records obtained from 1987 to 2004. Since 2004, another peak associated with malocclusion complaints at the age of 5-6 years appeared.
4.Chief complaints in regard to malocclusion and dental trauma showed increasing tendencies.
We concluded that an investigation of chief complaints among pediatric dentistry patients is very important to under recent trends regarding the oral conditions of children with special needs.
