Can deciduous malocclusion phenotypes predict future respiratory co-morbidity?

The way the teeth come together is the province of dentistry. Pediatric dentists, general dentists who see children, and orthodontists have the skills to address the craniofacial structures and relieve or prevent the pain and suffering sometimes associated with early childhood malocclusion. The reader may be more familiar with “Early Childhood Caries” (ECC), a term proposed at a 1994 workshop sponsored by the Center for Disease Control [1] and later implemented as an all-inclusive International Classification of Diseases-9 edition (ICD-9) diagnostic descriptor. Prior to that workshop, when describing children of preschool age, typically 3–5 years, who had severe caries, terms like nursing bottle caries, nursing caries syndrome, caries of infancy, primary dental caries, and others were used. Emphasis was placed on overconsumption of fruit juices and other sweet beverages and unhealthy baby bottle usage practices. Rolling all the disparate terms into ECC allowed recommendations for healthy habits to be more efficiently and effectively integrated into practice. There is not a similar list of terms to describe unhealthy growth and development of the craniofacial respiratory complex, the collection of skeletal, soft tissue, and functional anatomy that make up the upper airway. Teeth are part of that complex as they erupt on the maxilla and mandible, providing visual cues such as narrow arches, open bites, and profiles that set too far back, crowding the nasoand/or oropharynx. Following the lead of Early Childhood Caries, we propose the term Early Childhood Malocclusion (ECM).