A Scoring System for Equine Dental Health

Abstract Scoring systems have been implemented in veterinary practice to indicate the severity of pathologies, such as lameness and gastric ulceration. The need for a scoring system of equine dentition in relation to digestive health has been identified. A scoring system would allow veterinarians, owners, and researchers to more accurately assess dental health and the resulting impact it may have on chewing ability. A proposed system, the Equine Dental Scoring System (EDSS), was developed via collaboration of a team of veterinarians and equine nutritionists familiar with equine dental abnormalities. The EDSS was designed to assign higher scores corresponding to increasing severity of dental abnormalities that would impede proper chewing. The proposed scoring system ranges from 0 to 5 as follows: 0) no sharp enamel points, soft tissue damage, or malocclusion, (1) sharp enamel points, but no soft tissue damage or malocclusion, (2) sharp enamel points and soft tissue damage, but no malocclusion, (3) mild malocclusion with all aligned teeth meeting level (ex. ramps, hooks), (4) moderate malocclusion with all teeth meeting but not level (ex. wave, smile, diagonal, frown), (5) major malocclusion with one or more teeth not meeting or inhibited temporomandibular joint movement (ex. step, shear, retained cap), and/or infection, and/or pain while chewing. The EDSS was validated by assessing agreement via the Cohen’s kappa statistic between four trained professionals scoring ten images of horse dentition. Both the weighted (к = 0.62) and unweighted (к = 0.73) kappa statistics indicated substantial agreement between scorers, signifying reliable repeatability of the EDSS. Presenting dental health in the form of a score would indicate severity of dental pathologies and allow for quantitative and statistical evaluation of dental health in nutrition research and veterinary medicine.