Nutritional Status and Caries at Children in Tajinan Sub-District Malang District

Abstract

Background: Caries is a multifactorial disease that can happen to all ages, caries and malnutrition are problems that often happens to children and can affect general health. Caries can be related to malnutrition. Caries can make the child uncomfortable and lower the child’s appetite, thus leading to the decrease of nutritional intake which can make the child’s tooth more susceptible to caries and make the existing caries more severe, then it’s back to the beginning where the worsened caries will make the child’s appetite worse and so on. Objectives: To know the relations between caries and nutritional status at children in Tajinan sub-district Malang district. Methods: 80 elementary students were selected from two elementary school at Tajinan sub-District Malang District. Then the nutritional status is measures by anthropometric, using the body mass index for age (IMT/U) and Z-score and the level of caries is measured by using DMF-T and def-t index. Conclusion: There is an inverse relationship between the two variables (nutritional status and caries) in children, which means the lower the child’s nutritional status the higher the caries is and vice versa. The Spearman significancy is p=0,012 (P<0,05). Conclusion: There is a relationship between nutritional status and caries.