Oral health behaviours of parents and young children in a practice‐based caries prevention trial in Northern Ireland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: The NICPIP trial evaluated the costs and effects of a caries prevention intervention delivered to 2- to 3-year-old children attending dental practices in Northern Ireland. This supplementary study explored the oral health behaviours of children and their parents to help understand the reasons for the trial's findings. METHODS: A mixed methods study that included a questionnaire completed by all parents (n = 1058) at the time they brought their child for the NICPIP final clinical assessment. The questionnaire collected data on frequency of toothbrushing and sugar consumption. Questionnaire data were analysed by trial group and caries status. Parents of trial participants (n = 42) were invited to take part in telephone interviews. Parents were purposively sampled according to trial group and whether or not their child developed caries. The interviews explored how and why oral health behaviours happened. Interview data were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically. RESULTS: The questionnaire data indicated that toothbrushing and between-meal sugar snacking were common in the majority of children. The children of parents who automatically reminded their child to brush their teeth were more likely to remain caries-free (Odds Ratio 1.24; 95% CI 1.08, 1.41; P = .002). Frequency of sweet drink consumption was associated with the child developing caries (Odds Ratio 0.88; 95% CI 0.79, 0.98; P = .021). The interview data showed that parents had positive attitudes towards brushing both in terms of perceived importance and expected outcomes. Attitudes towards sugar snacking were more complex, with parents reporting difficulties in controlling this behaviour. Sugar was described as being something that was "ever present" in children's lives. CONCLUSIONS: Toothbrushing was widely adopted from a young age, but between-meal sugar consumption was highly prevalent. The results suggest that effective family-level and population-level interventions are needed to reduce sugar consumption if substantial improvements in caries prevention are to be achieved.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".