For dental caries this corresponds to a concentration of effort on those individuals who are at a high risk of ending up in the right-hand tail of the distribution of caries experience (Fig. 28.9), while little attention is paid to the majority of the population with small or negligible individual disease risks. To be able to target this right-hand tail it is necessary to be able to predict future caries development.
This topic is discussed in Chapter 29, which concludes that such prediction may be impossible. Even so, proponents of
the high-risk strategy advocate this strategy on the basis of five principal arguments