Objective To investigate the anti-caries effect of risk grading assessment of dental caries combined with comprehensive kindergarten health care measures in children, and explore a more effective implementation scheme for the comprehensive grading management of dental caries in young children.

Methods In April 2017, the children aged 3 to 5 years were recruited as subjects with stratified cluster random sampling method from 4 kindergartens in Chaoyang District of Beijing, China, and then randomly divided into experimental group and control group to conduct a 1-year follow-up investigation on the development of dental caries. For the children in the experimental group, Caries-risk Assessment Tool (CAT) released by American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry was used to evaluate the risk grade of dental caries, and comprehensive grading management of dental caries was implemented according to the corresponding guidelines in CAT combined with comprehensive kindergarten medical care measures; the children in the control group were managed according to the current oral public health project. During the investigation, a questionnaire survey was performed to investigate the factors such as fluorine intake, children's oral hygiene behaviors, and awareness of oral health among children and parents. SPSS 21.0 was used for the statistical analysis of questionnaires to compare the incidence rate of dental caries between the two groups.

Results A total of 177 children were followed up, with the prevalence of caries before the health intervention (mean decay missing filled teeth, mean DMFT) being 55.36%(2.14). After risk grading management of dental caries combined with comprehensive kindergarten health care measures for 1 year, the incidence of caries (mean DMFT) in the control group and the experimental group were 12.36% (2.29) and 8.86% (3.39), and there was a significantly lower incidence rate of dental caries in experimental group than the control group (χ²=50.77, P < 0.05). The incidents of cares in control group was 71.59% for 1 year. There were significant differences between the experimental group and the control group in children's fluorine intake, oral hygiene behaviors, the attitude towards oral health management among children and parents, and parents' mastery of oral health knowledge (P < 0.05).

Conclusion Risk grading management of dental caries combined with comprehensive kindergarten health care measures can effectively reduce the incidence rate of dental caries in children and improve children's oral health awareness and literacy, which is thus an effective management method for dental caries in children.