Breast and Bottle Feeding as Risk Factors for Dental Caries-Review Rezvi Fathima Bareera1,**, Dr. Abilasha R.2,* 1BDS (I), Fundamentals of Dentistry Department, Saveetha Dental College, Chennai-600 077 2Senior Lecturer in Oral Pathology, Department of Oral Pathology, Saveetha Dental College, Chennai-600 077 *Corresponding Author E-mail: abilasha.ramasubramanian@gmail.com
**bareera.rezvi@yahoo.com
Online published on 12 January, 2017. Abstract During the past few years, researchers have given a considerable amount of attention to analyze the relationship between breast feeding, bottle feeding and dental caries. It is important to understand the role played by breast feeding and bottle feeding in the development of dental caries in children. This in turn makes it easier for the dentists, parents and care takers and helps them understand the children better, prevent them from diseases and also to develop public health codes. There is evidence to support the many health benefits related to breast feeding but researches are being carried out to establish a link between these two feeding types and dental caries. The aim of this review is to summarize, evaluate and analyze scientific literature and discuss the risk of dental caries that can be caused by breast and bottle feeding methods. Articles related to this topic collected from electronic database such as PubMed, Google scholar etc. It was shown in a meta-analysis of cross sectional studies that children who were breastfed were less affected by dental caries than those who were bottle fed. Majority of the studies show that children who were bottle fed were more prone to caries than those who were breast fed. Some studies indicated that no such link between the two feeding methods was found. Therefore, the current scientific literature state that breastfeeding can provide protection against early childhood dental caries in children. Top Keywords Breast feeding, bottle feeding, caries, prevent, early childhood dental caries, risk. Top |