To reduce weight gain and encourage healthy eating including reduced sugar intake, Under 5 Energize (U5E) was introduced to 121 early-childhood-centres in the Waikato region of New Zealand in July 2013. Using anonymized data collected from January 2013 to September 2016 through free physical assessments of all 4-year-olds provided by the NZ Ministry of Health, the prevalence of obesity and dent...

Tooth decay is ubiquitous among humans and is one of the most prevalent oral diseases. Although this condition is largely preventable, more than half of all adults over the age of eighteen present early signs of the disease, and at some point in life about three out of four adults will develop the disease. Tooth decay is also common among children as young as five and remains the most common ch...

above, it would appear desirable to give some attention in human dental studies to the physical properties of individual foods and of food mixtures with respect to their tendency for retention by the teeth. The elimination from the diet of foods that are difficult to remove from the teeth would perhaps go far in wiping out dental caries. It is also apparent from the results that a diet consider...

OBJECTIVES To improve reliability of salivary bacterial cultures as a surrogate for plaque levels of cariogenic bacterial species by reporting the salivary CFUs of these organisms as a function of the number of teeth. DESIGN Cross-sectional collection of data in a convenience sample of adults over 60 years of age. SETTING Hospital Dental clinic, University bacteriology laboratory. SUBJECT...

BACKGROUND Smokers often have oral health problems. We studied whether poor oral health among non-smoking adolescents is connected to smoking behaviour in adulthood. METHODS We used an age cohort born in 1979 (n = 2582) taking part in annual oral health check-ups between the ages of 13 and 15. Self-reported non-smokers were used as the study population. As measures we used decayed, missing or...

The link between obvious decay (caries) experience, and characteristic low socioeconomic status of prisoners, has been extensively reported; like many other health concerns e.g. substance misuse and mental health, prevalence of dental caries is higher when compared to the general population. Individual level strategies for oral health improvement are mainly educational in nature focussing on re...

Dental caries and periodontal diseases in humans have an astonishing impact on the health and welfare of communities. Sick leave, due to oral infections, and the consequent cost of dental treatment results in costing billions of dollars each year [1]. In 2007, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that 5-10% of public health expenditure was related to dental care. ‘Tooth decay and, to a le...

We describe the case of a 43-year-old man who was referred to our dental school"s acute care clinic with pain and swelling of presumed dental origin in the left maxillary quadrant. Radiographic examination revealed extensive dental decay and periodontal disease. On questioning, the patient admitted to paresthesia of recent onset. Paresthesia associated with pain or swelling of the jaws is an om...