International study aims to reduce childhood caries

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research will donate $1.2 million toward new research aimed at reducing childhood caries.

The research will examine a new approach to dental care that employs four concurrent therapies to people living within First Nations communities. Its goal is to reduce the marked early childhood caries disparities that exist between First Nations and non-First Nations children in Canada.

First Nations is a term of ethnicity that refers to Aboriginal people living in Canada who are neither Inuit nor Métis.

The study will use dental treatment, fluoride applications, anticipatory guidance, and motivational interviewing specifically designed for First Nations pregnant women, and will commence this spring in several communities across Ontario and Manitoba.

Canadian results are to be compared with results accumulated by researchers working in Australia and New Zealand.

Early childhood caries is a significant health problem confronting indigenous communities in all three countries, according to principal investigator Herenia Lawrence, DDS, PhD, from the University of Toronto.

"We hope that by working in partnership with Aboriginal communities here in Canada we can create an intervention that will reduce the dental treatment needs of young children and motivate mothers to subscribe to better preventative oral health practices," Dr. Lawrence stated in a press release. "Our long-term goal is to create a culturally appropriate intervention that reduces dental disease burden and health inequalities among preschool indigenous children in the participating countries and that can be readily applied to other populations with high levels of early childhood caries."

Four other Canadian universities will join the University of Toronto for this investigation: the Northern Ontario School of Medicine at Laurentian University, the University of Manitoba, the University College of the North, and the University of Waterloo.

The five-year study is titled Reducing disease burden and health inequalities arising from chronic dental disease among Indigenous children: an early childhood caries intervention.