New Technique Effective in Treating Tooth Decay

Oral health is very important for the overall health of a child. However, tooth-related problems are very common in childhood and American children are affected with tooth decay more than any other constant infectious diseases.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than one-fourth of American children aged between 2 and 5 experience tooth decay.

Delaying or skipping the dental treatment can lead to serious pediatric oral diseases and other long-term health problems in children. However, children, scared about the needles and drills at the dentist, often hesitate to report their dental problems.

Helping parents to solve this problem, researchers have developed a new technique known as "Hall" that treats tooth decay easily and effectively. The Hall technique uses a stainless steel crown to seal the decay. Due to insufficient nutrients, the decay will stop progressing and slows down. The crown will fall off with the tooth, later.

The effectiveness of the new technique, developed by a Scottish dentist Dr. Norna Hall, was confirmed through experiments conducted on 190 children aged between 5 and 8 in New Zealand.  All the participants were affected with tooth decay, with more than six fillings in their mouth. Led by Dr. Lyndie Foster Page from the University of Otago, researchers treated 100 children with the Hall technique, and the rest with traditional methods.

Researchers found the Hall technique (90 percent) helping in avoiding the usual dental anxiety associated with dental visits, as compared to the conventional method (52 percent). Apart from that, the new technique was found to be time-saving and more effective than the other method.

"After six months, children who had conventional treatment had twice as many dental abscesses and nearly three times as many replacement fillings as those who were treated with the Hall technique," Dr. Page said in a news release. "There's a strong shift in dentistry towards not removing all the decay in the tooth. We know that when we drill a tooth, the tooth doesn't like it; you get an inflammatory response. If the decay is close to the nerve then perhaps it's best to leave it."

Apart from the experiments conducted on New Zealand children, researchers had earlier proved the benefits and effectiveness of the new technique through a five-year study conducted in Scotland.

The Hall technique is costly compared to conventional methods. However, according to Dr. Page, crowns will prove to be cheaper in the long run.

"Replacing a filling two or more times during a tooth's life may actually cost more than a crown in the long term with labour costs included - and then there's the cost to children's well-being," Page explained.