The Early Childhood Caries Project is a collaborative effort between the Institute, Children’s Hospital Boston, and St. Joseph Hospital for Specialty Care in Providence, Rhode Island to implement evidence-based methods of managing and preventing early childhood tooth decay in patients seeking treatment at hospital-based dental clinics. Since the fall of 2008, over 450 children have been enrolled, treated and followed.
Early Childhood Caries
Dental caries (also known as tooth decay) is a chronic, infectious disease, but completely preventable. However, without treatment, dental caries progresses to cause cavities, pain, tooth loss, and infection. The results are eating and speech problems, and negatively impacted learning in children and lower productivity for parents.
Hospital-based dental clinics care for a disproportionate number of low-income and racial and ethnic minority children with early childhood caries. Many of the children end up being treated surgically, with months-long backlogs for expensive operating room care and a high rate of reoccurrence after treatment.
About this Project
By using the evidence-based protocol of care, the program aims to break the cycle of childhood caries in this patient group by reducing the frequency of operating room treatments and instances of reoccurrence.
"Specifically, it has been our goal to reduce the percentage of re-infection in patients treated at the hospital dental clinics by 33%, reduce the percentage of patients who are treated in the Operating Room by 20%, and reduce the percentage of patients complaining of pain on their most recent visit by 50%," explained Dr. Alex White.
"To do this, we are using every point of intervention to engage and educate the child's guardians and then to make sure the child had access to reliable preventive and restorative care by connecting him or her with a dental home for ongoing support and coordination of follow up evaluations. In the process of meeting this objective, we are also tracking the cost per case."
Clinical Investigators
Principal Investigators are Dr. Man Wai Ng, Chief of the Department of Dentistry at Children's Hospital Boston, Dr. Dan Kane, Director of Dentistry at St. Joseph Hospital Providence and Dr. B. Alex White, Director of Analytics for the DentaQuest Institute. Gay Torresyap, Clinical Research Coordinator at the DentaQuest Institute, has been coordinating data collection between the two clinical sites.
Patient enrollment began in March 2008 and complete findings scheduled to be released in fall 2009. The first clinical phase of this study ends in September. "As we analyze the data, we will be very interested in whether and how the children's risk level has changed," said Dr. White.
Detailed data from this project will be available in October, 2009.
