Recent Advances in Caries Prevention and Immunization

Dental caries is the most prevalent chronic disease affecting the human race. It is said that once it occurs, the scar persists throughout life even though lesion is treated. Traditional management of a caries lesion primarily was focused on operative treatment. The last two decades have seen a growing insight about the process of lesion development and its casual and continual factors. The uneven distribution of carious lesions has prompted calls for attention to the provision of caries prevention procedures appropriate to each individual’s current disease burden, and risk for development of future lesions. Application of specific preventive treatment protocols is a concept for which there has been increasing support within the dental profession.Thus, in the quest for providing optimal dental care, the age old maxim of ‘prevention is better than cure' holds true.