Throughout my childhood, I had no restorations in my mouth, apart from pit and fissure sealants. My father and uncle were dentists, as is my brother-in-law. My sister is a hygienist. It makes sense that I would have no caries as a child. I was low caries risk my entire childhood. Of course, it didn’t stay that way when I went to college. I came back after my freshman year at the University of Texas with eight class II lesions. Oops! I did make it 18 years, though. Not bad!
I don’t have children myself, but all my friends do, and I am fortunate to treat them. I don’t love restorative dentistry on pediatric patients, but I don’t mind providing preventive services. When I was a kid, my prophies were short and sweet. Polish, fluoride gel, and done! That doesn’t seem to be what happens with my friends’ kids in my hygiene chairs. Their kids have calculus. Their kids have sticky plaque. Most of all, they have all had caries on primary teeth, and I have had to perform restorations on them.
This isn’t fun for them, for their parents, or for me. While we may think of childhood caries as a disease affecting only those of low socioeconomic status, it is certainly not. An increase in sugary drinks, fruit snacks, and gummy vitamins seem to be but a few factors in raising caries risk for children across the board. I do not find restorative dentistry on pediatric patients to be extremely fun or profitable, so I went looking for answers to reduce the caries risk in my friends’ kids and other pediatric patients. I found an answer in an old friend … PreviDent 5000 ppm dentifrice.
I have been a PreviDent Booster 5000 ppm user for years. Since my freshman year of college, I have been using PreviDent in some form or another. However, we often think of prescription 5000 ppm dentifrice as an adult option. We sometimes hesitate to use fluoride in kids because we worry about ingestion. Plus, that strong minty flavor is not exactly a kid’s favorite. Colgate has answered these questions with PreviDent 5000 Kids. The Fruitilicious flavor is a favorite for kids. When they use a thin ribbon on their brush and expectorate after, it is completely safe. This is a great product to use for your pediatric patients with high caries risk.
At the end of the day, a dental practice is a business, though. Can prevention in pediatric and adult patients be profitable? Let’s look at some data to find out. Thankfully, Sikka Software Corporation has done some research supported by Colgate,1 and the results will surprise you.
Sikka is a data analytics company focusing on retail health care. They took on the challenge of answering the great question of preventive dentistry: Does fluoride use (in this case, PreviDent 5000) actually benefit the patient?
Fluoride study specifics
The first step to answering this question was setting up a patient selection method. For a study like this, we want to examine a lot of average patients to get an idea of their disease patterns.
