Caries diagnosis under the focus of the evidence-based dentistry

Any dental clinician, specially the pediatric dentist, needs to have know-how about the available diagnostic procedures for dental caries detection and understand the effectiveness of these procedures in order to give appropriate weight to the result in clinical decision taking. The purpose of the present paper is to verify the status of the literature about the procedures available in dental caries diagnosis, in pediatric dentistry,using the evidence-based dentistry methodology. This study was carried out in two phases. The first one consisted in a search for texts related to the theme, in English language and indexed in the MEDLINE database,as well as a review of some Epidemiology books. After that, all abstracts of the papers obtained through the key words provided by the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), were read and classified according to their relevance and pertinence. The journal and the countries that mostpublished relevant and pertinent papers were Caries Research and theUnited Kingdom (UK) and United States of America (USA), respectively.No pertinent meta-analysis has been made until the present moment.