A Socio-Medical Approach applied to Determine Dental Caries Risk Factors among Bulgarian Dental Medicine Students

In the dental daily practice, the socio-medical approach finds a concrete expression in the social history of the disease. The aim of the research was to determine the social and behavioral risk factors in dental caries etiopathogenesis in healthy young Bulgarians without general and chronic diseases and without periodontal and mucosal diseases. The participants were dental medicine students (i. e. from the same social age group and ethnicity) (n = 110) aged 18-25 with a preserved dentition of 28 teeth. The participants completed questionnaire about their dietary habits, snacks between meals and other behavioral and social factors associated with the development of the dental caries. Based on their DMFT scores the students were classified into two groups caries-active and caries-resistant. The results were processed by using IBM SPSS Statistics v19. The differences between caries-active and caries-resistant students regarding their parents education and profession, food, hygiene and harmful habits, fluoride prophylaxis, orthodontic treatment, are small and not significantly different in terms of statistics, except for the visits to the dentist. This confirms once again the great homogeneity of the selected participants in the study.