General Dental Practitioners’ Views on Early Childhood Caries and Timing of the First Dental Visit in Selangor, Malaysia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This survey evaluated the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of general dental practitioners (GDPs) in Selangor regarding early childhood caries (ECC) prevention and the recommended timing of a child's first dental visit. A questionnaire was mailed to 521 licensed GDPs. Descriptive statistics were used, and bivariate and logistic regression analyses were performed. The response rate was 52.6%. Although 89.8% mentioned counseling parents and caregivers, only 44.2% were familiar with anticipatory guidance. Whereas 98.2% agreed that early examinations are important to prevent ECC, only 51.8% were aware of the recommendation for a first visit by 12 months of age. GDPs who recommended early dental visits were significantly more likely to be recent graduates, more familiar with professional guidelines, and less likely to be deterred by a child's crying or behavior. In conclusion, GDPs in Selangor are aware about the importance of early dental visits in ECC prevention. However, a considerable number of them are still not aware of the recommendation that children must first visit the dentist by 12 months of age. Furthermore, some of their current practices in ECC management and prevention do not match professional recommendations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".