Prevalence of Dental Caries in Hearing Impaired Children than 5 to 12 Years Old in Sofia

Introduction: Hearing impaired children are part of children with special needs in Bulgaria. To them so far not studied for incidence of dental caries. She is one of the very important indicators in the assessment of risk for its development, which is important for the modeling of the oral environment in every child. Aim: To determine the incidence of dental caries in hearing impaired children from 5 to 12 years old and a control group of healthy peers in Sofia. Materials and methods: The study covers 100 hearing impaired children and a control group of 100 healthy children. To them was assessed the prevalence of dental caries with index of the Klein, Palmer & Knutson (1938) DMFT, taking into account the total number of teeth that are carious (D), missing (M), due to caries or filling (F). Results: The results obtained show that the incidence of dental caries in 89% of the hearing impaired children and 76.8% of healthy peers is over 4 DMFT. The value of the DMFT index in both groups is respectively 5.02 and 4.39. Conclusion: The results clearly show the need for preventive measures to improve the dental health of children.