Etiology, Risk Factors and Groups of Risk

Population aging and the concomitant reduction in tooth loss will have a profound effect on dentistry. In particular, an increase in the prevalence of root caries can be expected. Root caries is not evenly distributed across the population and identification of high-risk groups or individuals would facilitate targeted prevention strategies. Unfortunately, the lack of consensus in the literature on the diagnosis and measurement of root caries makes comparison of studies extremely challenging. At present, we do not have an adequately validated risk assessment tool for root caries. Future research should focus resources on investigating risk indicators, which have been found to be significant in past studies and on externally validating previously described risk models.