Utah kids have a lot of things to smile about. But the health of their teeth isn't necessarily one of them.

A report by the Utah Department of Health reveals that Utah children, ages 8 to 12, have a slightly higher prevalence of decay than the national average - a problem local officials primarily attribute to a low rate of fluoridated water.Mike Fitzgerald, director of the department's Dental Health Bureau, said fluoridation of community water supplies is limited in Utah. Only 2 percent of the population using public water supplies consumes optimal levels of fluoride.

Fitzgerald, who maintains that less fluoride in the water means more tooth decay, is urging physicians and dentists to prescribe fluoride supplements.

And today more than 90 percent of physicians do just that.

The department's 1987 survey, he says, is strong evidence that children should take daily fluoride supplements during the first 14 years of life.

The survey, which sampled 1,507 children in all 12 health districts, showed differences in histories of dental decay among three groups of children: those who had received optimal levels of systemic fluoride for their entire lives, for some portion of their lives, or not at all.

Fitzgerald said the 957 children whose parents or guardians completed consent forms (64 percent of all pupils in the selected classrooms) were examined by a dentist. For 938 pupils, sufficient information was available from the parents or guardians for investigators to estimate lifetime fluoride histories.

The 110 children in the lifetime-fluoride category reportedly had received optimally fluoridated water or a daily fluoride supplement at home for at least six months of every year of life, or for all but one year of life. The 563 children in the partial-fluoride category reportedly had consumed fluoridated water or a daily fluoride supplement at home for as long as six months in a single year, but not long enough to meet the criteria for the lifetime-fluoride category.

The 265 children in the no-fluoride category reportedly had never received fluoridated water or a daily fluoride supplement at home for as long as six months in a single year.

Fitzgerald said one dentist completed all clinical examinations following the protocol and criteria used for prevalence surveys conducted by the National Institute of Dental Research.

His examinations showed dental decay in the permanent teeth of 50 percent (477) of the children. Of those who received no fluoride, 54 percent had tooth decay, compared with 36 percent of those with lifetime fluoride exposure.

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Among those surveyed, children with no exposure to systemic fluoride were more likely to have had dental decay in permanent teeth than children with a lifetime exposure to fluoride, Fitzgerald said.

A similar pattern occurred when severity of dental disease was considered.

Fitzgerald said a positive result of the survey is that 31 percent of the children had dental sealants - a plastic-like resin placed on the biting surfaces of the back teeth to prevent the children from getting cavities.

The percentage of Utah children having this done is three times the national average.

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