Screening preschool children with toothache: validation of the Brazilian version of the Dental Discomfort Questionnaire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Dental Discomfort Questionnaire (DDQ) is an observational instrument intended to measure dental discomfort and/or pain in children under 5 years of age. This study aimed to validate a previously cross-culturally adapted version of DDQ in a Brazilian children sample. METHODS: Participants included 263 children (58.6% boys, mean age 43.5 months) that underwent a dental examination to assess dental caries, and their parent that filled out the cross-culturally adapted DDQ on their behalf. Exploratory factor analysis (principal component analysis form) and psychometric tests were done to assess instrument's dimensionality and reliability. RESULTS: Exploratory factor analysis revealed a multidimensional instrument with 3 domains: 'eating and sleeping problems' (Cronbach's alpha 0.81), 'earache problems' (alpha 0.75), and 'problems with brushing teeth' (alpha 0.78). The assessment had excellent stability (weighted-kappa varying from 0.68 to 0.97). Based on the factor analysis, the model with all 7 items included only in the first domain (named DDQ-B) was further explored. The items and total median score of the DDQ-B were related to parent-reported toothache and the number of decayed teeth, demonstrating good construct and discriminant validities. CONCLUSIONS: DDQ-B was proven a reliable pain assessment tool to screen this group of Brazilian children for caries-related toothache, with good psychometric properties.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".