The utility of dental health capacity of the first permanent molars as an oral health indicator among children and adolescents

Copyright © 2015 by Journal of Korean Academy of Oral Health This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine the utility of the dental health capacity of the first permanent molars as a disease-oriented index, and to assess the value of this metric as a healthoriented index. Methods: This study used data from 29,630 participants (6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 15-year-olds) in the 2010 Korea National Oral Health Survey. The dental health capacity of the first permanent molars (DHC of 1st molars), functioning teeth index (FS-T), and tissue health index (T-Health) were measured. To assess whether the dental health status was properly reflected, the correlation of DHC of 1st molars with three indices (number of sound teeth, FS-T, and T-Health) was analyzed. Also, in order to evaluate whether the dental caries status was properly reflected, the correlation of dental caries presence with DHC of 1st molars was analyzed. The DHC of 1st molars was measured using Clune’s method. Results: FS-T and T-Health were affected by permanent teeth eruption, and these indices became stabilized after eruption was complete. The DHC of 1st molars remained stable regardless of eruption of permanent teeth. The DHC of 1st molars was positively correlated with the number of sound teeth, FS-T, and T-Health. The DHC of 1st molars was highly correlated with the decayed-missing-filled teeth index in all ages. Among individuals with dental caries, the percentage of those with caries in the first molars was more than 88%. The DHC of 1st molars showed relatively high correlation with high caries risk. Conclusions: The dental health capacity of the 1st permanent molars has good utility not only as a disease-oriented index that is associated with dental caries but also as a health index among children and adolescents.