Abstract
Objective. To compare salivary cortisol levels of children with ECC and their mothers with those of caries free children from a similar sociodemographic cohort. Design. Sixty-four college-educated, working mothers from middle income families with no history of anxiety disorders and their first born children aged between 48 and 71 months were included in the study. Salivary cortisol levels were analyzed using electrochemiluminescence (ECL) immunoassay. Statistical Analyses. Significance of difference between the cortisol levels of children with ECC and control children and of their mothers was analyzed using the Student's t- test. The intraclass correlation coefficient was used to measure the significance of correlation of cortisol levels between the mother and the child with logistic regression to explore possible associations. Results. Mothers of children with ECC had significantly higher levels of salivary cortisol (P < 0.05) than mothers of caries free children. The salivary cortisol levels of children with ECC were significantly higher than caries free children (P < 0.0001). A significant correlation existed between the salivary cortisol level of the mother and that of the child (P < 0.0001). Conclusion. While salivary cortisol levels of the child seem to have a direct impact on the incidence of ECC, maternal stress seems to have an indirect effect.
Highlights
Childhood caries (ECC) has been defined as the occurrence of one or more carious lesions occurring in a child younger than 71 months of age [1]
The salivary cortisol levels of the mothers ranged between .093 μg/dL and .995 μg/dL
The salivary cortisol levels of the children ranged from .012 μg/dL to .54 μg/dL
Summary
Childhood caries (ECC) has been defined as the occurrence of one or more carious lesions occurring in a child younger than 71 months of age [1]. Caries is a multifactorial disease, and among the many factors associated with ECC, the role of stress has recently received a lot of attention [2,3,4,5]. A unifying conceptual model has suggested that in addition to environmental and child factors maternal factors, such as stress in the mother, could contribute significantly to the development of early childhood caries [6]. The development of caries in children of mothers with high stress has been attributed to the poor parenting and feeding habits that are a result of stress [4, 6, 9]. Little attempt has been made to either quantify this stress using a biomarker or evaluate the correlation between the stress level of the parent and that of the child with relation to early childhood caries
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