The NobleDentist Blog

Children’s Teeth – A Cause for Concern?

Posted in Dental Health News by Dion Kramer on March 7, 2006

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released a report they titled ‘The Child Dental Health Survey, Australia 1999: Trends across the 1990s’. The report involved a survey of nearly 372,000 children in 1999. And the data obtained was compared with earlier surveys. The report has provided a look into changes in children’s dental health at the end of the 20th century.

Here are a few items that were noted.

  • The number of decayed, missing, or filled baby teeth in Australian children increased at the end of the 1990s.

  • The number of children not having experienced tooth decay decreased.

  • Five year olds experienced an increase in decayed, missing, filled baby teeth increasing by 22% between 1996 and 1999. Six year olds increased by 8% during the same period.

  • The 10 per cent of 6 year olds who had experienced the most tooth decay in 1999 had more than 5 times the number of decayed, missing or filled baby teeth (about 8 teeth per child) than the national average.

  • ‘This information follows two decades of declines in tooth decay relating to children. There is now a trend of increases in tooth decay in younger children. And some children have very high levels of decay.’

  • ‘There is no room for complacency,’ says report co-author Jason Armfield.

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