Microbial Indicators of Caries Activity in Saliva of Children Living in Greece

Abstract

Dental caries is the most common chronic disease of childhood [1] and is about five times more common than the next most prevalent chronic disease among children and adolescents, asthma [2]. If not treated in time, it can affect not only the mastication function but also the speech, smile and psychosocial environment and the quality of life of the child and the family [3,4]. The incidence of dental caries for children from lower socioeconomic families is higher. In Greece, the prevalence of dental caries in the 5-year-old age group is 42.8% and it increased to 62,9% among the 12-year-old children [5]. Dental rehabilitation is often expensive, and children suffering from dental caries are highly predisposed to greater caries incidence in later years [6]. The most recent hypothesis for the etiology of dental caries is the ecological plaque hypothesis and states that the dental plaque biofilm becomes pathogenic when external challenges drive it towards a state with a high proportion of acid-producing bacteria [7]. However, only a limited number of bacteria are consistently recovered from caries lesions and have thus been recognized to be specifically associated with dental caries. The ecological concept of caries was subsequently extended by Takahashi and Nyvad [8,9], and maintains that ecological phenomena, e.g. bacterial adaptation to acidic environments (increases in bacterial acidogenicity and acidurance) and bacterial shifts to a more acidogenic and aciduric microbiota (increases in the proportion of acidogenic and aciduric bacteria), are induced by frequent and prolonged acidification.