Dental caries, periodontal status, and associated conditions in Latvian adolescents aged 12 and 15 years: national cross-sectional survey 2022/2023

National cross-sectional oral health survey of 12- and 15-year-old pupils attending general education schools in Latvia. Field work ran from October 2022 to May 2023 in 58 schools drawn by stratified cluster sampling across all six Latvian statistical regions.
Ten calibrated examiner teams recorded dental caries at surface level on 28 permanent teeth using merged ICDAS/ICCMS criteria, allowing analysis at three diagnostic thresholds: D1 (initial enamel lesions), D3 (enamel-dentine junction), and D5 (dentine cavitation). Inter-examiner kappa was 0.67 to 0.80 at the enamel threshold and 0.70 to 0.92 at the dentine threshold.
The dataset also covers periodontal status (Basic Periodontal Examination by sextant), fissure sealants, molar-incisor hypomineralisation, dental fluorosis (Dean index), tooth wear (TWI), abrasion and attrition, dental trauma by tooth, oral mucosal pathology, orthodontic treatment experience, and a behavioural questionnaire covering toothbrushing frequency, toothpaste fluoride content, dietary sugar, dental attendance, and tobacco use.
This is the anonymised public release. Direct and quasi-identifiers were removed, generalised, or replaced with hash-based surrogates using the privacyR package. School and pupil codes were combined and replaced with surrogate identifiers, date of birth was reduced to birth year, examination date to year and month, and settlement type collapsed to urban and rural. Free-text responses were recoded. One hundred records are withheld from the public file and available under a signed data use agreement.
The public file holds 3,658 examinations across 235 variables. Full variable documentation, value labels with English translations, provenance, and known issues are in CODEBOOK.md. A machine-readable Frictionless Data Table Schema is provided as datapackage.json. The anonymisation script is included as anonymise_dataset.qmd.
Ethical approval: Research Ethics Committee of Riga Stradins University, 26 November 2020, No. 6-1/12/6. Written informed consent was obtained from parents or legal guardians.
CONTENTS
01_README_EpiDentLatvia_Young.md: Orientation for this deposit. Study summary, quick-start R code, anonymisation summary, and conditions of use. Start here.
02_CODEBOOK.md: Full variable dictionary for all 235 columns, with English translations of Latvian value labels, provenance, anonymisation detail, restricted-access terms, and known data issues.
03_datapackage.json: Machine-readable schema in Frictionless Data Table Schema v1 format. Declares the type, description, and permitted values of every column, allowing automated validation and import.
04_df_public.csv: The data. 3,658 examinations, 235 variables, UTF-8, comma-delimited. Missing values coded NA.
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Results computed from the public file differ slightly from those in the associated publication because 100 records are withheld. Reproducing the published figures exactly requires the restricted file, available on request under a signed data use agreement from the corresponding author.