How the detection, assessment, diagnosis and monitoring of caries integrate with personalized caries management

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of how the detection, assessment, diagnosis and monitoring of caries integrate with personalized caries management. The background includes the continuing burden of preventable disease that dental caries represents on a global scale. Despite this, and evidence that a purely restorative approach will not 'cure' the disease, preventive caries control has been slow to be adopted in many countries. Following a series of initiatives in the last decade, there is now a range of clinical criteria and tools that can be employed to help clinicians plan patient-centred comprehensive and preventively biased care for their patients. At the core is a sound foundation of lesion detection, assessment and diagnosis which, when combined with appropriate patient level risk information and monitoring, enables effective treatment planning. The International Caries Detection and Assessment System (ICDAS) can enable this process. The ICDAS provides clinical criteria and codes, together with a framework to support and enable personalized comprehensive caries management for improved long-term health outcomes. The target audience for this book comprises those with an interest in dental caries and its clinical management; this should in no way detract from the parallel missions in the domains of dental public health, research or education. If progress is to be made in this field, it is important that a compatible series of terms can be shared across the dental domains and across countries. This will ensure better clinical and patient understanding and help facilitate getting research findings into clinical practice in a more efficient way.