The purpose of this study was to find out the relationships between daily habits and the changes in dental caries experience with advancing age in young children.
68 young child patients visiting the pedodontic clinic of Ohu University Dental Hospital were surveryed for 4 years from 2 to 5 years of age. All of them had 20deciduous teeth.
The relationships between their daily habits and there caries experience were analysed by means of the first type of Hayashi's quantification methods, using the dft index as the object variables and 20 items from questionnaires as explantory variable.
The results were as follows.
1) The dental caries experience rate at 5 years of age was higher with a 27.4%df person rate,28.1 % df tooth rate and 5.6% dft index than that at 2 years of age.
2) The object variables that showed larger partial correlation coefficients and a closer dft index both at 2 and 5 years were frequency of eating snacks and drinking beverages between meals, frequency of brushing teeth, the age of the mother at birth, kinds of feeding, number of brothers /or sisters, kinds of family, occupations of the guardians, times of getting to dental clinic, chief complants and so on.