The University of Queensland says dozens of children are missing out each week on the chance to have free dental work, as chairs in its $134 million oral health tertiary centre sit empty.

The Herston centre, which replaced a Turbot Street site in the CBD after 73 years , is used to train dental and oral health students who perform dental work for the public.

Most of the services provided at the UQ Oral Health Centre are free, and there is a waiting list of up to six months for adults.

However the take-up rate for children has been underwhelming, UQ Bachelor of Oral Health program coordinator Andrea Maguire said.

She said the school lost many of its regular child patients after an initiative with a Queensland Health dental facility in Yeronga ended in 2014.

Ms Maguire said the university was hoping to see about 70 children between the ages of 3 and 17 each week.

Services on offer include examinations, x-rays, fillings, extractions, stainless steel crowns, cleaning, polishing and fluoride applications.

“The students are very well supervised by registered dentists and oral health therapists,” Ms Maguire said.

“Generally speaking, [children’s teeth] are not in good health. It’s certainly not as good as we’d like to to be, that’s for sure.”

A Queensland Health survey of more than 5000 children taken between 2010 and 2012 found one in three children under six had never been to the dentist.

The survey also showed half of the children aged between 5 and 10 had decay in their primary teeth, and only three quarters of all children brushed their teeth twice a day.

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, one third of Australians aged between 25 and 44 have untreated tooth decay, and about a third had not visited the dentist in the last 12 months.

Source:

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/university-of-queensland-looks-for-child-dental-patients-20150819-gj32we.html

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/11785186/My-children-refuse-to-brush-their-teeth.html

Angela Debley took her son Fin, then eight, to the dentist for a check-up, confident that he’d be given the all-clear.

After all, Angela, an admin manager from Bracknell, Berkshire, was a self-confessed ‘health freak’ who was always careful to give her two sons, Fin and Joe, then three, a nutritious diet. She was also meticulous about their dental hygiene.

‘I avoided giving them sweets in favour of what I believed was an extremely good diet full of natural foods,’ says Angela, 40.

‘Instead of fizzy drinks, chocolate and crisps, the kids would have pure fruit juice, muesli bars and granola with natural yoghurt and honey. They also brushed their teeth morning and night.’

When the dentist broke the news that Fin had two cavities in his milk teeth, which had developed since his last appointment six months before, Angela says she ‘felt like the worst parent in the world’ – but she couldn’t work out where she’d gone wrong.

‘The dentist seemed to assume I was feeding him junk food and sweets, which was upsetting because we ate well.’

In fact, it was her children’s healthy diet – and particularly their snacking habits – that had caused the damage.

Angela later learned it wasn’t just the quantity of sugar that was the problem, but the frequency with which teeth are exposed to it. ‘By offering juice, fruit and honey between meals, I was bathing my sons’ teeth in sugar and acid.’

As Professor Damien Walmsley, scientific adviser to the British Dental Association, explains: ‘Children today snack far more often than previous generations, which leaves teeth under constant attack.’

Last month, a Royal College of Surgeons report revealed that one-third of five-year-olds in England suffer from tooth decay, and it is now the leading cause of hospital admissions for under-nines.

The report, The State Of Children’s Oral Health, found that every year 46,000 children were admitted to hospital for multiple tooth extractions – almost 26,000 of those aged between five and nine.

Professor Nigel Hunt, of the Royal College of Surgeons, blamed sugary foods and drinks, saying these should carry cigarette-style warning pictures to highlight the risk to children’s teeth.

But the problem is certainly not confined to children brought up on junk food, or who aren’t taken to the dentist regularly. In fact, dentists say they are seeing more and more children from middle-class homes whose health-obsessed parents are inadvertently harming their teeth.

Dr Rhona Eskander, of the private Chelsea Dental Clinic, says parents are horrified to discover that they have caused their children’s dental decay.

‘Sometimes sporty children may be given unnecessary sports drinks, which are high in sugar and acids that damage teeth,’ she says. ‘Health-conscious parents also like yoghurt drinks – but these “healthy drinks” usually contain high levels of hidden sugars.’

And while a favourite ‘virtuous’ snack is the muesli bar, some cereal bars have twice the levels of sugar as a similar-sized chocolate bar.

There are two ways in which these kinds of foods damage teeth. One is acid erosion, which occurs when teeth are exposed to acidic foods such as fruit and juice. Dried fruit such as raisins may cause acid erosion, too.

Tooth enamel begins to soften and be destroyed when acid levels in the mouth drop below 5.5 on the pH scale. (Water has a pH of 7, oranges have between 3 and 4.)

After 30 minutes to an hour, saliva, which is alkaline, will restore natural pH balance in the mouth and the enamel will harden, but if the exposure to acid is too frequent – as caused by constant snacking – then the enamel begins to wear away.

This not only makes teeth more vulnerable to decay, but if teeth are brushed within 30 minutes of acid exposure, the softened enamel can be literally scrubbed off.

‘As children’s milk teeth have thinner and softer enamel, they are particularly at risk,’ says Dr Hanel Nathwani, of Reading Smiles in Berkshire. The second major threat is sugar. As Professor Walmsley explains: ‘Bacteria that live in the mouth cause decay, because as they feed off sugars they excrete an acid that attacks enamel in a similar way to acid erosion.’

These bacteria love refined sugar most, but they also feed on honey, and even processed starchy foods such as bread.

‘Acid attacks can last for up to an hour, but teeth can recover provided you limit the sugary foods and drinks to mealtimes only,’ says Professor Walmsley.

Even if it’s only the milk teeth that are affected, this can still lead to long-term problems.

‘If children have to have milk teeth removed, teeth start to shift to fill the space, so their second teeth can’t grow into their natural position,’ says Dr Nathwani. ‘This can affect the alignment of their teeth, and mean the child is more likely to need braces.’

He adds: ‘I often see parents who feed their families generally great diets and are very shocked when they learn that their children have tooth decay because of these apparently healthy foods.

‘I feel for them, as they are trying their best to do the right thing.’

This rang true for Angela. Fin and Joe would have four or more snacks a day, such as granola and honey mid-morning, milk at night, plus juice and fruit whenever they wanted it during the day.

She used to give her sons muesli bars as an after-school snack.

‘I thought they were a healthy alternative to sweets and biscuits, but after I moved the family to Dr Nathwani’s practice, I looked more closely at the labels and noticed they were packed with more sugar than a chocolate bar.’

Angela gave the children milk before bed, thinking the calcium would be good for their teeth. However, Dr Nathwani says: ‘While milk during the day is fine, the lactose in it is a type of sugar and can be harmful at night, as when we are asleep we produce less of the saliva that would neutralise it

Angela is far from the only health-conscious parent to discover she’s unwittingly exposed her child to tooth decay.

Louise Jones (a pseudonym, as she’s too embarrassed to give her real name) discovered her ‘fruit monster’ son needed four fillings at the age of seven because he constantly snacked on oranges, grapes and apples.

‘My family call me the “fridge Nazi” at home, because I’m so careful with my children’s diet,’ she says. ‘I was very proud that he loved fruit so much.

‘I was horrified when his dentist told me that my son had such bad teeth because constant exposure to acid in fruit was literally dissolving the enamel on his teeth. I now give fruit at mealtimes and just once a day as a snack.’

The fad for smoothies doesn’t help, as Dr Uchenna Okoye, of London Smiling dental practice warns. ‘Juice from fruits has a high acid content and can damage the enamel of your teeth in exactly the same way as fizzy drinks do.’

Source:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3192993/A-bedtime-glass-milk-ruin-child-s-teeth-lactose-type-sugar-harmful-night.html

Cavities occur when parts of teeth decay—in modern times, the fix requires drilling out the decayed matter and filling the resultant hole with a hard material that will stay put preventing further damage or decay. People living during the Late Upper Paleolithic were not so lucky, they had to suffer, or undergo cavity manipulation from a friend using a sharp piece of flint—at least according to the researchers working on the teeth of a skeleton unearthed in Italy over twenty five years ago. No one noticed at the time that a cavity in one tooth appeared to have undergone treatment, or repair. The skeleton was dated back to 13,820 to 14,160 years old and his approximate age at death was placed at 25.

Upon noticing that it appeared that the cavity had been cleaned, the team decided to take a closer look. They studied the surface inside the cavity with an electron microscope—that revealed grooves and ridges that appeared to be caused by scraping. The team then conduced several experiments on teeth that were subjected to rocks, wood and other abrasive material to see if they could replicate the grooves and ridges found in the ancient tooth—marks made by sharpened flint, they found, matched nearly exactly. The evidence suggests that the young man underwent the first found example of corrective dentistry—someone had dug around in his cavity with a sharpened piece of flint attempting to remove the decayed matter and thus, most likely, alleviating a tooth-ache.

The finding predates other examples of known early dentistry, such as a tooth with a beewax filling from approximately 6,500 years ago and evidence of dental drilling that occurred approximately 9,000 years ago. The researchers suggest it marks a major milestone in dental cavity manipulation and shows that early people combined manual dexterity with creative thinking to alleviate suffering due to tooth decay.

More information: Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 12150 DOI: 10.1038/srep12150

Source:

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-07-earliest-evidence-dental-cavity.html

Lindsay Argyle M ’15 has plenty of reasons to smile.

The certified dental hygienist officially completed her master’s degree in community health from SUNY Cortland last week when she presented her culminating project on a national award-winning program she helped develop. Her work, which relied on second-year students from SUNY Canton’s dental hygiene program educating schoolchildren in Rome, N.Y., earned recognition from the American Dental Hygienists Association (ADHA) earlier this summer at the organization’s annual session in Nashville, Tenn.

The Student Member Community Service Award sponsored by Colgate recognized a collective effort.

“The national award really is a reflection of both the (SUNY Canton) students’ hard work and dedication to their community and the quality education I received at SUNY Cortland,” said Argyle, of Fayetteville, N.Y.

An adjunct instructor in SUNY Canton’s dental hygiene program, housed in Rome, she also serves as the dental hygienist for Family Health Network’s local school health program, educating children throughout Cortland County on the importance of taking care of their teeth and other oral health services.

As Argyle finished all of her other master’s coursework in December, she saw a way for one quality program to fulfill two needs: the service component of a SUNY Canton community health course for undergraduates and her own capstone project at the College. SUNY Cortland Associate Professor of Health Jena Nicols Curtis encouraged Argyle, who collaborated with Kasey Penoyer, the community health instructor at SUNY Canton.

Lindsay Argyle M ’15

“It all went together,” Argyle said. “In my master’s courses at Cortland, I structured the framework to attempt an oral health promotion or tooth brushing program. After collaboration with Kasey and learning of the need for a community outreach program for the Canton students, I thought, why not structure one program that combines the two?”

The award-winning work started as an oral needs assessment among youngsters in Oneida County. It involved 16 dental hygiene students educating and screening more than 100 second graders at Bellamy Elementary School in the Rome City School District on vital habits such as proper brushing and flossing techniques as well as how to make food choices to ensure oral health.

Schoolchildren who showed signs of tooth decay were given referrals to a dental provider. Others took a field trip to SUNY Canton’s teaching clinic, where many received a dental exam, x-rays and sealants if they were eligible, as well as a fluoride treatment.

Dr. Terrence Thines, the chief of dental surgery for SUNY Upstate Medical University’s dental residency program, and two residents offered dental exams. Dental supply providers GC America, Dentsply, Patterson Dental and Ultradent donated products. And the Cortland College Foundation provided additional funding for the community outreach project.

“Our assessment showed that there was a large percentage of the students who were covered by insurance —including Medicaid — but the percentage indicating a dental visit within the past year was around 30 percent,” Argyle said. “Our needs assessment revealed unmet needs that included dental decay and issues with access to care.

“That’s what this project was about: providing much needed dental health education, identifying gaps in access to care, providing some free preventative services where care was needed, and providing appropriate referrals for problems that may have otherwise gone undetected. It was beneficial for all parties involved.”

The national honor proves as much.

Source:

http://www2.cortland.edu/news/detail.dot?id=480437a1-30be-49c5-b20c-cde9ee38ef8e