Tooth decay by far the biggest reason for hospital admission
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- Published: Thursday, 17 July 2014 07:55
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Data released by the Health and Social Care Information Centre show that the number of admissions for dental problems among 5 to 9-year-olds rose from 22,574 in 2010-11 to 25,812 in 2013-14. Kathryn Harley, a consultant in paediatric dentistry, told the Sunday Times: “We have children who require all 20 of their baby teeth to be extracted. It beggars belief that their diets could produce such a drastic effect.”
Almost 26,000 children in England aged between 5 and 9 have been hospitalised to have multiple tooth extractions in 2013-14 — the equivalent of nearly 500 a week. Dental leaders described the figures as shocking and said they were proof of the damage being done to children’s teeth by the overconsumption of sugary drinks and fruit juice.
Graham Barnby, honorary vice-president of the British Dental Health Foundation, told the newspaper: “It all relates to the consumption of sugary, fizzy drinks.” Kathryn Harley said: “They are going into hospital because they are either presenting with acute problems with pain or because the stage of dental disease, the number of teeth with decay, is such that they need a general anaesthetic.”
She said most children will require “maybe four or eight teeth to be extracted, quite a few will require 10, 12 or 14”. In her view the consumption of fruit juice is so damaging to children’s teeth that it should be banned at school. Parents were “inadvertently responsible and they care dreadfully that their child is in this position”, she said.
There is also concern that children are ending up in hospital because dentists do not carry out fillings. Professor Jimmy Steele, head of the dentistry school at Newcastle University, told the Sunday Times that some dentists prefer to observe how decay in baby teeth progressed because of uncertainty over the effectiveness of fillings. Steele said: “Dentists are much less likely nowadays than they used to be to try to fill teeth using conventional measures.”
NHS England commented: “We have some of the lowest rates of tooth decay in the world but these statistics are of course worrying. Parents of young children should discourage them from drinking fizzy drinks as this can lead to tooth decay.”
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