The decline in cavities in children and adolescents is slowing down in Spain, and there aren’t signs of significant improvements in adults either. This is clear from the Oral Health Data Bank Insights (ohdbi), a system developed at the UV for displaying epidemiological data on oral health. The tool was presented by Professor José María Montiel-Company from the Department of Stomatology.
“The trend lines are showing us that the decline in cavities in the permanent teeth of children and adolescents is slowing down and will enter into a plateau phase in a few years. We have already seen this happen with the data regarding cavities in baby teeth whose indicators have been stagnant for 25 years,” explained Montiel-Company. “However, the rate of restoration, that is, the percentage of cavities that are filled, continues to increase year after year, although at a slower rate in baby teeth,” he adds.
“In young adults and older adults we aren’t observing any improvements in the number of cavities or in periodontal disease either. And it is even more worrying in the latter group, who will undoubtedly become the population group with the highest demand for treatment and care in the next decade,” the study warns. Furthermore, there is growing concern about the emergence of dental erosion, which is increasing each year, due, among other causes, to the abusive consumption of acidic beverages and affecting one third of the young adult population.
José María Montiel-Company presented these results at a conference during the 28th Congress of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology and Oral Public Health (SESPO), which took place in Valencia this month. Oral Health Data Bank Insights (ohdbi) is the definitive and improved version of the Oral Health Data Bank Spain UV. Ohdbi uses an inter-community analyser capable of calculating epidemiological trends that show changes in the main oral diseases over time, specifically dental cavities and periodontal disease.
According to the researchers, these findings present us with a “major, high-priority challenge that will require profound changes in the existing preventative strategies for oral diseases, the allocation of greater human and financial resources, and the involvement of new parties.”
The new version of the data display platform includes all of the epidemiological studies carried out in Spain, by autonomous communities, since 1969 to the present. It is capable of generating more than 8,000 different graphics thanks to its dynamic and interactive nature, as well as including all the original data sources in its bibliographic collection available for pdf download.
The project was developed by a multidisciplinary team made up of UV professors of epidemiology and preventative and community dentistry José María Montiel-Company and José Manuel Almerich Silla, as well as Aarón W. Montiel Nicholas, graduate in data science from the UV and creator of the Insights version. The project was funded by Colgate, Palmolive and Elmex.
The data display platform is available with free access at https://www.uv.es/ohdbi
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