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.
Adolescent Analysis of Variance