Assessment of the Age, Reasons, Oral Health Status and Dental Treatment Needs of Children in Their First Dental Visit

We are going to provide each parent or guardian whose children fulfilling the inclusion criteria attending to Department of Paediatrics Dentistry at Cairo University to fulfil questionnaire which include multiple MCQ questions. The state of oral health and dental treatment needs will be assessed based on clinical examination, according to recommendations of the World Health Organization. The total number of teeth and number of teeth affected by decay (d, D) in every child will be recorded. The intensity of caries will be estimated based on the average dmf/DMF number, i.e. caries intensity index.

The dental treatment needs of each child will be assessed based on the following categories:

1. None: no restorative treatment required.
2. Simple: preventive treatment required, such as scaling and brushing, oral hygiene instruction (OHI), application of topical fluoride and fissure sealant.
3. Moderate: one or more of teeth require one or two surface restoration.
4. Complex: one or more teeth require three or four surface restoration / stainless steel crown, endodontic therapy and crown, and /or extraction(7) .

Reasons for first dental visit will be categories as :

a. Adaptive visit dental check-up preventive purpose. b. Tooth pain. c. Emergency case (tooth injury, abscess, infection). d. Decay noted by parent.

e. Any Other. We will explain to the parents and legal guardians the aim of the study without any guiding to prevent any information bias which may occur. The questionnaire will be given before the treatment and will be collected after it. Any children whose records will include missing information will be excluded from the study.