Caries diagnosis under the focus of the evidence-based dentistry

Resumo

Any dental clinician, specially the pediatric dentist, needs to have knowhow about the available diagnostic procedures for dental caries detection
and understand the effectiveness of these procedures in order to give
appropriate weight to the result in clinical decision taking. The purpose
of the present paper is to verify the status of the literature about the
procedures available in dental caries diagnosis, in pediatric dentistry,
using the evidence-based dentistry methodology. This study was carried
out in two phases. The first one consisted in a search for texts related to
the theme, in English language and indexed in the MEDLINE database,
as well as a review of some Epidemiology books. After that, all abstracts
of the papers obtained through the key words provided by the Medical
Subject Headings (MeSH), were read and classified according to their
relevance and pertinence. The journal and the countries that most
published relevant and pertinent papers were Caries Research and the
United Kingdom (UK) and United States of America (USA), respectively.
No pertinent meta-analysis has been made until the present moment.