Dentistry

• About 60 percent of Children’s dental patients have special needs, ranging from autistic disorders to bipolar disorder and to cerebral palsy. Children’s has years of experience treating children with special needs and has unique insight into this patient population’s physical and emotional needs.
• Children’s specialists pioneer new research. David Bellinger,PhD, MS, a neurology researcher at Children's, was lead author of New England Children's Amalgam Trial, a study that found no adverse health effects in children who received silver amalgam fillings.“None of the results provided any indication that the children were being harmed by amalgam," he says. He cautions, however, that this is just one study and it did not include children under age 6, who could be more vulnerable to mercury's effects.
• Children’s Stephen Shusterman, DMD, Richard Bruun, DDS, and Bonnie Padwa, DMD, MD, visited China, where they participated in the National Child Cleft Lip and Palate Therapy Seminar, shared their protocol for the management of cleft patients and lectured on preventive dentistry.

• Tooth decay is the most common chronic disease of childhood – five times more common than asthma and seven times more common than hay fever
• 28 percent of preschoolers have cavities
• 51 million school hours are lost each year to dental-related illness
• 108 million American children are without dental insurance, which is 2.5 times the number lacking medical insurance
• The recommend age for the first visit to the dentist is 1 year old because dental cavities are almost completely preventable if the disease and risk factors are identified early

Man Wai Ng, MD, dentist-in chief, is undertaking one of the only quality improvement initiatives for pediatric dentistry in the country: redesigning the care delivery system based on the prevention and management of cavities. Instead of “drilling and filling,” Ng advocates for treating cavities as a disease that can be reduced and controlled. In addition to office-based treatments, her project includes educating parents and giving them self-management plans. She’s finding a marked decrease in new cavities and a reduced need for surgical treatments—costly endeavors that often require a child to undergo anesthesia.