Caries risk assessment among 12-13 year old school-going children of government and private schools of Tirupur district, Tamil Nadu.

BACKGROUND: Dental caries is as ancient as humankind and has the longest association with the dental profession, an association that is punctuated with agony and ecstasy. The agonizing fact is that despite several efforts toward total eradication, this disease is still prevalent. Nevertheless, an ecstatic success of the profession is the global decline in the incidence compared to the yesteryears' epidemics. Hence, predicting dental caries earlier is a boon. One such model to predict is cariogram developed by Bratthall in 1996.

AIM: The aim of this study was to assess the caries risk among 12-13 year old school-going children of government and private schools of Tirupur district in Tamil Nadu using cariogram computer model.

METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was carried out among 136 study subjects of 12-13 year of age, who fulfilled the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Data were collected using a predesigned questionnaire and scored according to a standardized protocol. The Chi-square test was used to find differences between caries-related factors and cariogram group. The correlation was acquired using Spearman's correlation.

RESULTS: Government school study subjects had 56% of chance of avoiding caries whereas the private school study subjects had 66% of chance of avoiding caries in future and the differences were statistically significant (P = 0.001). A negative correlation was observed between the chance to avoid dental caries and cariogram sectors.

CONCLUSION: The majority of the study subjects from government school belonged to medium-risk category and private school subjects belonged to low-risk category which inferred that private school students have high chance to avoid dental caries compared to government study subjects.