Gingival condition associated with two types of orthodontic fixed retainers: a meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The maintenance of gingival health around orthodontic fixed retainers (FRs) is difficult and different designs have been proposed. OBJECTIVE: The goal of this systematic review was to analyse whether FR designs that allow unobstructed interproximal flossing, compared with the ones that do not, improve gingival parameters. SEARCH METHODS: Detailed individual database search strategies for Cochrane Library, 'Latin' American and 'Caribbean' Health Sciences Literature, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science were developed. Grey literature was also considered. SELECTION CRITERIA: Clinical trials and cross-sectional studies that compared two types of FRs (plain and waved) were included and evaluated. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Study selection, data extraction, and risk of bias (RoB) assessment were performed individually and in duplicate. The methodology quality was assessed using the MAStARI RoB tool. RESULTS: Four studies met the inclusion criteria, and all presented moderate RoB. While two of those studies found a statistically significant difference in gingival parameters, the other two did not report differences. A meta-analysis was conducted based on two of the selected studies, which performed evaluations of plaque index (PI) and calculus index (CI). The results revealed no differences on PI between wave FR and plain FR of 0.46 (0.24 to 0.69) and no differences on CI of 0.12 (-0.10 to 0.33). Regarding comfort, no clear differences were identified. CONCLUSIONS: There is not enough scientific evidence to support or not an association between FR design and gingival health, flossing frequency, or patient comfort. REGISTRATION: PROSPERO - CRD42016030059.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".