Supporting data for thesis titled "Are calcium- and phosphate-containing fluoride varnishes more effective than the conventional fluoride varnish in preventing early childhood caries?"

This data contains supporting resources for the thesis titled "Are calcium- and phosphate-containing fluoride varnishes more effective than the conventional fluoride varnish in preventing early childhood caries?" The thesis is pivoted on a randomised clinical trial that started to recruit children in 2019. 

The baseline characteristics of the study participants is published in International Dental Journal (Article title: Risk indicators for non-cavitated and cavitated carious lesions in preschool children- Manchanda et al., 2023). The follow-up data of this two-year randomised trial is under consideration for publication in a refereed journal at the time of publishing this data. The first dataset associated with these publications was generated utilizing the demographic characteristics of the study population, knowledge attitude and practices regarding oral health,  and clinical parameters (including visile plaque index and dental caries) at the level of teeth.

A subset of the above population was randomly sampled from the above dataset and saliva and plaque were collected to evaluate the quantity of S.mutans and L. fermentum using the qRT-PCR technique. The baseline characteristics of that subset with the microbiological counts in saliva and plaque samples are published (Article title: Manchanda S, Cheung BPK, Lee GHM, Lo ECM, Yiu CKY. Quantitative analysis of salivary and biofilm bacteria associated with cavitated and non-cavitated carious lesions in pre-school children. Arch Oral Biol. 2023;146:105607. doi: 10.1016/j.archoralbio.2022.105607.). At the time of this data publishing, the two-year follow-up of this subset is under peer review regarding the effect of three study varnishes in altering the microbiological counts.