H. Hausen et al., Caries data collected from public health records compared with data based on examinations by trained examiners, CARIES RES, 35(5), 2001, pp. 360-365
Collecting data for dental caries studies is costly. In countries where uni
form patient records are available for virtually the whole population, it i
s tempting to use them as a data source. Our aim was to compare data collec
ted from patient records to those obtained by trained examiners. In 1992 an
d 1995, dentists who were specially trained and calibrated examined random
samples of 12- and 15-year-olds living in two towns in Finland. The dental
record of each child was obtained from public dental clinics, the dental st
atus was entered into a computer file, and the DMFS value was calculated. D
ata were available for 824 children. In the two data sets, 1.3% of the toot
h surfaces were recorded differently (DMF vs. sound) with the related kappa
value being 0.70. In two thirds of the discrepancies, the reason was that
a filling was marked in only one of them, which confirms the known difficul
ty in discerning a white filling. For 48% of the subjects, the DMFS values
calculated from the two sets of data were equal. The difference was 1 and 2
surfaces for 28 and 11%, respectively. Public health dentists had almost e
qually often registered more and less DMF surfaces compared to trained exam
iners. The results suggest that data collected from public health records a
re not decisively inferior to those obtained from examinations by trained e
xaminers. In large enough settings, data obtained from patient records coul
d possibly be used as a replacement for separate surveys. Copyright (C) 200
1 S. Karger AG, Basel.