Thanks to his decade-long efforts promoting a more accessible way of cavity treatment to the Chinese people, Dutch oral health specialist Jo E. Frencken is awarded China's prestigious International Scientific and Technological Cooperation Award this year.
"It is certainly a prize that is considered to be very important in China. The prize will be conveyed to me by the Chinese President, that is enormous!" said the retired head of the Department of Global Oral Health at the Radboud University of Nijmegen during an interview with Xinhua, days ahead of his journey to Beijing, where he will attend the award ceremony scheduled on Jan. 8.
With this highest distinction given to several foreign individuals or organizations in the sci-tech field every year, the Chinese government intends to honor and express gratitude to their contributions to science advancement and social development in China. Prof. Frencken is the second Dutch winner after Evert Jacobsen, a plant-breeding expert at Wageningen University who won the award in 2005.
As the inventor of the Atraumatic Restorative Treatment (ART) for dental cavities, Prof. Frencken has been working with Chinese institutes to spread his minimal intervention approach into China since 2006.
"In short, ART can be described as 'filling without drilling.' Normally children are afraid of the electrical drill because of the sound and afraid of anesthesia because of the needle and the numb feeling it gives. With ART, you remove the decayed tooth tissue with hand instruments and you do not need local anesthesia. So it is a much more pleasant way of approaching the patient, and it gives the same results," explained Prof. Frencken. "However, not all tooth cavities can be treated in this way."
Since its conception in 1985, the ART approach has been proven to be efficient in preventing and stopping the progression of dental caries. It is recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) since 1994, not only for the sake of being less anxiety- and pain-provoking, but also because of its easy accessibility -- with no need of electricity or running water, it can be performed in more outreach situations such as at school, at home or in remote villages.
As summarized by Prof. Frencken, "it is a low-tech method to prevent and treat cavities, and it can influence the lives of people in a very pleasant way. That is very valuable. And it has also a caries preventive component."
During the past three decades, the Dutch specialist went around the globe to bring his method to more people. Cooperation with the Dutch Nijmegen dental health team has been set up in dozens of countries.
The need for accessible cavity treatment is everywhere : WHO statistics show that 60% to 90% of school children and nearly 100% of adults around the world have dental cavities. Moreover, oral disease is higher among poor and disadvantaged population groups, and use of oral health services is markedly low among people living in rural areas, which highlights accessibility as a strong point of ART.
In his cooperation with China, Prof. Frencken has supervised three PhD students. In 2012, he was appointed Visiting Professor of the Hospital and School of Stomatology of Wuhan University. The Dental School of the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen started cooperation with Wuhan University in 1992, by now several of its departments have established connections and are conducting research with top dental schools in seven Chinese cities.
"We have conducted important clinical research of which the results show that ART is applicable in China," Prof. Frencken told Xinhua.
Like in many other developing countries, people in China are in need of better dental care. Tooth extraction is still the main treatment for dental diseases in rural areas, possibly because of the restricted accessibility to preventive dental care and lack of well-trained dental personal in the rural region, according to research conducted in China's eastern province of Shandong by Zhang Qian, who is one of the "products" of the Nijmegen-Wuhan dental care cooperation.
To implement his method in China, the next step is to make use of the clinical research results and to teach ART in schools to influence the minds of the youngsters in the profession, Prof. Frencken told Xinhua.
"The mindset of dentists has to change. Currently they might rather pick the newest high-tech tools to fix a problem than opt for the low-tech ART approach," he said. "But some drills move so fast that the cavities only become bigger, so you loose healthy tooth material and make the tooth weak. If you start destroying teeth unnecessarily early on, they will fall out when people get older."
For his colleague Prof. Nico HJ Creugers, from the Department of Oral Function & Prosthetic Dentistry, to change the current mindset means to adopt a new mentality towards technology.
"Dental care in China seems to be going in the direction of higher technology, which is more expensive and less accessible. There is a big temptation to do a lot while not really focusing on the problem. ART goes the other direction: it focuses on the problem, it does what is necessary in a correct and easy way, and it is accessible for everybody," he told Xinhua.
With an evident eagerness to pursue and deepen their cooperation with China, the Dutch specialists also listed some suggestions of work that still has to be done, such as a more balanced distribution of funding between laboratory research and clinical research, as well as a better design of health insurances covering dental care.
"It is our mission to make what we know available for many people, and we have ideas on how to keep continuing the implementation of ART in China. It would be very nice if it gets a boost because of this prize," said Prof. Frencken.
