Did the use of minimum interventions for caries management change during the COVID-19 pandemic? A cross-sectional study

Aim: to evaluate changes in the frequency of use of minimum interventions (MI) techniques for caries management during the COVID-19 pandemic. Materials and Methods: a questionnaire was applied through the SurveyMonkey ™ platform to evaluate changes in the dentist’s frequency of use of non-invasive, micro-invasive, minimally invasive, and mixed interventions, non-aerosol, or aerosol productive, to manage dental caries before and during COVID-19 pandemic. Differences in the use of MI techniques were analyzed by Wilcoxon test and the effect size (ES) was calculated. An α = 0.05 was adopted. Results: a total of 781 dentists answered the questionnaire; most of them were female (76.4%), with 30’s (76.4%), graduated over 10-24 years ago (38%) in public dental schools (62%), graduated in southwest of Brazil (38%), that work in clinical environment (66.8%) and in private jobs (53.4%). During COVID-19, among the sample, 91 respondents were not working. In relation to the non-invasive techniques, only the use of casein phosphopeptide amorphous calcium phosphate (CPP-ACP) decreased during the COVID-19 pan demic (p
Source: Caries Research - Category: Dentistry Source Type: research