Predicting trend of early childhood caries in mainland China: a combined meta-analytic and mathematical modelling approach based on epidemiological surveys

Xiaonan Zhang,Jinlin Song,Zhaoying Liao,Yonghong Zhang,Lei Zhang

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-06626-w

Abstract

Early childhood caries (ECC) is the most common chronic disease in young children. A reliable predictive model for ECC prevalence is needed in China as a decision supportive tool for planning health resources. In this study, we first established the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and grey predictive model (GM) based on the estimated national prevalence of ECC with meta-analysis from the published articles. The pooled data from 1988 to 2010 were used to establish the model, while the data from 2011 to 2013 were used to validate the models. The fitting and prediction accuracy of the two models were evaluated by mean absolute error (MAE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). Then, we forecasted the annual prevalence from 2014 to 2018, which was 55.8%, 53.5%, 54.0%, 52.9%, 51.2% by ARIMA model and 52.8%, 52.0%, 51.2%, 50.4%, 49.6% by GM. The declining trend in ECC prevalence may be attributed to the socioeconomic developments and improved public health service in China. In conclusion, both ARIMA and GM models can be well applied to forecast and analyze the trend of ECC; the fitting and testing errors generated by the ARIMA model were lower than those obtained from GM.

Highlights

The early childhood caries (ECC), the tooth decay occurred in any primary tooth in a child 71 months of age or younger1, has been reported as the most prevalent infectious disease of children
Data used for establishing Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and grey predictive model (GM) models came from the combined results of a meta-analysis, which was conducted according to the preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analyses (PRISMA) checklist
Understanding the temporal trend of Early childhood caries (ECC) may facilitate the allocation of oral health resource

Summary

Introduction

The early childhood caries (ECC), the tooth decay occurred in any primary tooth in a child 71 months of age or younger, has been reported as the most prevalent infectious disease of children. The ECC prevalence in mainland China is comparatively high, 65.5% for 1–6-year-olds and 66.1% for 5-year-olds, far from the target by WHO “half of the 6-year-old children are caries-free”. The ECC prevalence in mainland China is comparatively high, 65.5% for 1–6-year-olds and 66.1% for 5-year-olds, far from the target by WHO “half of the 6-year-old children are caries-free”3 It has an adverse impact on children’s nutrition intake, speech, and daily routine activities, and on their physiological health . It only needs a small sample to establish the model and to predict with a certain precision, which is especially applicable for the system with fuzzy structure or imperfect data. To establish the optimal model to predicate the trend of ECC in mainland China, we pooled data from existing reports with meta-analysis to calculate the national prevalence of ECC from 1988 to 2013.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion