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Preface

The spectrum of diseases affecting the oral cavity during childhood and adolescence is very broad. Some of the disorders are entirely benign and transient, while others may be painful, severe, and even life-threatening. Like other diseases affecting young patients, oral diseases become a source of anxiety for the parents, and sometimes may adversely affect the normal development of both the body and the mind of the young patients. They also pose diagnostic difficulties for pediatricians, since many of them fall on the borderlines of many specialties, such as dentistry, dermatology, pediatric oncology, plastic and maxillofacial surgery, and oral medicine, each with its own perspective and point of view.

The main purpose of writing this atlas of pediatric oral diseases was to overcome these difficulties by organizing the available information on a uniform basis, combining pictorial material and important clinical, diagnostic, and therapeutic information in a compact format. Some histopathological, immunological, and radiographic pictures have been included where it was thought that they would be helpful. The emphasis is on the brevity and clarity of the written summaries and of course on the quality of the pictorial material, which was collected over a 30-year period.

Gathering and classifying the pictorial material and the disease entities involved considerable difficulties, due to the extremely wide spectrum of conditions concerned and the particular character they take on in pediatric patients. The material of the book has been subdivided into three major parts: local diseases, systemic disorders affecting the oral cavity, and tumors.

The bulk of the pictorial material was collected by the author and photographed using a Nikon medical camera. It is the author’s hope that the book will prove useful and will facilitate communication among pediatricians, specialists in oral medicine, orofacial surgeons, dermatologists, otorhinolaryn-gologists, and pediatric and general dentists---with beneficial results for our young patients.

George Laskaris, D.D.S., M.D.

Athens, 1999