Present and future approaches for the control of caries.

This article summarizes current and potential future approaches for the management of caries. Current surveys suggest that traditional "drill, fill, and bill" dentistry is still widely practiced in the United States in spite of considerable evidence that supports a minimally invasive treatment approach. Because there is a wide variability in treatment decisions on when and how to prevent new lesions, on how to arrest the progression of existing lesions, and on when and how to place initial and replacement restorations, the findings from some studies differ significantly from the results of other studies. While fluoride treatments are known to prevent a percentage of new lesions, they do not have the ability to prevent all caries lesions. Modern management of caries entails treating patients according to risk and monitoring early lesions in tooth surfaces that are not cavitated. Although we know that the dmfs score for children is a powerful predictor of caries increment in permanent teeth of these children a few years later, this score is rarely used in private practice as a measure of risk or as a measure of treatment success. Although these modern methods for caries management offer great promise for controlling the disease, they may take decades to apply in a standardized way so that the variability in treatment is reduced. However, during the next two decades, an alternative approach to caries prevention such as replacement therapy and a caries vaccine may become available as a more consistent method of controlling this disease.