Expert consensus on dental caries management

Dental Caries are a chronic oral disease that significantly threatens human beings’ health. Though dentists and researchers have struggled for decades to combat this oral disease, the incidence and prevalence of dental caries remain quite high. Therefore, improving disease management is crucial for the whole population and life cycle management of dental caries. So clinical difficulty assessment system of caries prevention and control is established based on dental caries diagnosis and classification. Dentists should perform an oral examination and show dental records at each visit. When a treatment plan is made based on caries risk assessment and carious lesion activity, we need to work out patient‑centered and personalized treatment planning to regain oral microecological balance, control caries progression, and restore the structure and function of the carious teeth. And the follow-up visits are made based on personalized caries management. This expert consensus mainly discusses caries risk assessment, caries treatment difficulty assessment and dental caries treatment plan, which are the most important parts of caries management in the whole life cycle.