Studies on Dental Caries

Abstract

Clinical experience has long made it apparent that the several morphological types of permanent teeth differ in their tendency to be attacked by caries. However, available data (1-6) do not provide a fully quantitative exposition of these differences. On analysis, this situation may be shown to arise out of the fact that comparisons of the susceptibility of the several types of teeth have not, heretofore, taken complete account of differences among the teeth in the length of time they are exposed (after eruption) to the risk of attack by caries. Values for this variable, which has been designated by the term posteruptive tooth age have recently been obtained. These values are used in the present study to identify and compare the orders of susceptibility of the different morphological types of permanent teeth.