Oral Health Related Quality of Life: A Paradigm Shift in Understanding the Affects and Effects of Early Childhood Caries

Dental caries is a multi-factorial microbial disease that has afflicted the human race since ancient civilizations. Though dental caries is a preventable oral disease, children of all economic strata in India still suffer from various forms and severity of dental caries. To understand the impact of early childhood caries on the social life and activities of children Oral Health Related Quality of Life has been widely used as single measures of clinical diseases do not document the full impact of oral diseases. Oral health related quality of life is that aspect of dentistry which measures the patient’s own perception of whether his or her oral health has an impact upon his or her actual quality of life. Child ‘s oral health is governed by various factors like genetic and biological factors which provide an inherited predisposition to many individual responses affecting health status, the social environment factor which provides stability, safety, cohesion and educational attainment which can ameliorate the potential risk to good health, health behavior practices of the family reinforce the value of oral health. This poster forms a structure identifying all those factors and their influence on children’s oral health related quality of life and outcomes at individual family and community levels thus forming a simplified, analytical model for prevention of early childhood caries and generating healthy smiles for next generation.