The Prevalence of Dental Caries in Laos: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Background: Dental caries is one of health problem and most common chronic disease among children. The purpose of this systematic review are to determine the prevalence of dental caries in primary teeth, and permanent teeth among 3 to 15 years, between 2002 to 2024 throughout Lao PDR.

Methods: A systematic search of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Google scholar. search strategy for database by using key worlds to exact data pertaining to dental caries in Lao population, the studies inclusion criteria manuscripts published in English language from 2002 to May of 2024, the studies was used the Meta-Essentials version software for analyzed separately for primary and permanent teeth and deduced using the random effect model, fixed effect models, which had insignificant heterogeneity and forest plots were used to evaluate caries prevalence in both dentitions.

Result: In total 6212 subjects were included in a meta-analysis from 12 studies. The prevalence estimate of dental caries for primary teeth the mean of decay- missing filled teeth (dmft) index was 5.76 (95%confidence interval (CI):2.55-14.06) with average prevalence 98.3%. For the permanent teeth, the mean DMFT was 1.31 with 95% confidence interval (CI:1.66-4.27) and average was 44.8%.

Conclusion: This result indicates that the prevalence of dental caries in Laos is high, the available data does not provide a complete of dental caries across of Laos. Therefore, research should be focused on the prevalence for more geographical region in Laos.