Early childhood caries (ECC) is an aggressive form of dental caries occurring in the first five years of life. Despite its prevalence and consequences, little progress has been made in its prevention and even less is known about individuals’ susceptibility or genomic risk factors. The genome-wide association study (GWAS) of ECC (“ZOE 2.0”) is a community-based, multi-ethnic, cross-sectional, genetic epidemiologic study seeking to address this knowledge gap. This paper describes the study’s design, the cohort’s demographic profile, data domains, and key oral health outcomes. Between 2016 and 2019, the study enrolled 8059 3–5-year-old children attending public preschools in North Carolina, United States. Participants resided in 86 of the state’s 100 counties and racial/ethnic minorities predominated—for example, 48% (n = 3872) were African American, 22% white, and 20% (n = 1611) were Hispanic/Latino. Seventy-nine percent (n = 6404) of participants underwent clinical dental examinations yielding ECC outcome measures—ECC (defined at the established caries lesion threshold) prevalence was 54% and the mean number of decayed, missing, filled surfaces due to caries was eight. Nearly all (98%) examined children provided sufficient DNA from saliva for genotyping. The cohort’s community-based nature and rich data offer excellent opportunities for addressing important clinical, epidemiologic, and biological questions in early childhood.

The importance of visual aids in communicating clinical examination findings or proposed treatments in dentistry cannot be overstated. Similarly, communicating dental research results with tooth surface-level precision is impractical without visual representations. Here, we present the development, deployment, and two real-life applications of a web-based data visualization informatics pipeline that converts tooth surface-level information to colorized, three-dimensional renderings. The core of the informatics pipeline focuses on texture (UV) mapping of a pre-existing model of the human primary dentition. The 88 individually segmented tooth surfaces receive independent inputs that are represented in colors and textures according to customizable user specifications. The web implementation SculptorHD, deployed on the Google Cloud Platform, can accommodate manually entered or spreadsheet-formatted tooth surface data and allows the customization of color palettes and thresholds, as well as surface textures (e.g., condition-free, caries lesions, stainless steel, or ceramic crowns). Its current implementation enabled the visualization and interpretation of clinical early childhood caries (ECC) subtypes using latent class analysis-derived caries experience summary data. As a demonstration of its potential clinical utility, the tool was also used to simulate the restorative treatment presentation of a severe ECC case, including the use of stainless steel and ceramic crowns. We expect that this publicly available web-based tool can aid clinicians and investigators deliver precise, visual presentations of dental conditions and proposed treatments. The creation of rapidly adjustable lifelike dental models, integrated to existing electronic health records and responsive to new clinical findings or planned for future work, is likely to boost two-way communication between clinicians and their patients.

In this cross-sectional, community-based study among a multi-ethnic sample of preschool-age children in North Carolina, United States, we sought to quantify the association between guardians’ self-reported oral health and their children’s oral health and determine whether race/ethnicity and education level modify these associations. We used questionnaire (n = 7852) responses about caregivers’ and their children’s oral health and clinical examination-derived (n = 6243) early childhood caries (ECC) status defined at the ICDAS ≥ 3 caries lesion detection threshold. We used multi-level mixed-effects generalized linear models to examine the associations between the guardians’ reported oral health and their children’s reported and clinically determined oral health among the entire sample and within strata of race/ethnicity, guardians’ education, and children’s dental home. The guardians’ and their children’s reported fair/poor oral health (FPOH) were 32% and 15%, respectively, whereas 54% of the children had ECC and 36% had unrestored disease. The guardians’ FPOH was strongly associated with their children’s FPOH (average marginal effect (AME) = +19 percentage points (p.p.); 95% CI = 17–21), and this association was most pronounced among Hispanics, lower-educated guardians, and children without a dental home. Similar patterns, but smaller-in-magnitude associations, were found for the guardians’ FPOH and their children’s clinically determined ECC (AME = +9 p.p.; 95% CI = 6–12) and unrestored disease (AME = +7 p.p.; 95% CI = 4–9). The study’s findings support a strong association between guardians’ and their children’s reported and clinically determined oral health and implicate ethnicity, education, and having a dental home as factors possibly modifying the magnitude of these associations.