Dental caries in HIV-infected children versus household peers: Two-year findings

Purpose: This report will present a two-year comparison of the incidence and baseline prevalence of dental caries found in both the primary and permanent dentition among a cohort of HIV-infected children as compared to household peer control subjects who were not HIV-infected. Methods: The subjects in this report were from an initial cohort of 171 children (104 HIV positive and 67 HIV negative), who were participants in the Children s Hospital AIDS Program in Newark, New Jersey, from 1993-1995. This two year analysis reports the findings on the children who completed baseline through Year 02 examinations (N=121), aged 2-15 years old (68 HIV positive, 53 HIV negative). Results: While the DMFS incidence at Year 02 among the 6-11 year old control subjects was 17% higher than that of the HIV-infected cases (2.1 vs. 1.8, respectively) this same incidence was eight-fold higher for the control subjects among the 12-15 year olds (e.g., 8.1 vs. 1.0, respectively). The mean cumulative dmfs score to date for HIV-infected cases was higher than for the control subjects for both the 2-5 year olds and the 6-11 year olds, (11.0 vs. 7.0) and (10.0 vs. 4.0, P=.02), respectively. In all three age groups, HIV-infected cases had a greater number of primary teeth and fewer number of permanent teeth than the control subjects (P<.01). Conclusion: Given that HIV-infected cases had lower DMFS scores and higher dmfs scores than their household peer controls, the fewer mean number of permanent teeth among the HIV-infected cases suggests that this delayed tooth eruption pattern in permanent teeth contributed to the lower DMFS scores seen in the HIV-infected cases.