Recent advances in the management of childhood dental caries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dental caries continues to be a serious problem. Affecting 2.4 billion people, it is the most prevalent disease worldwide.1 Although a highly prevalent condition, the impact of childhood dental caries is often underappreciated as the disease is rarely life-threatening or overtly limiting on daily activities. However, it carries significant consequences for children in terms of day-to-day living and it is expensive to treat. Dental caries has a linear relationship with poverty, affecting those in lower socioeconomic groups most. This variation in disease levels is stark and can be clearly seen in the UK, with 56% of 5-year-old children in the deprived regions of Blackburn and Darwen having visible decay, but only 4% in the more affluent South Gloucester similarly affected. In England as a whole, a quarter of 5-year-olds have visible dental caries, with an average of three to four decayed teeth each. Tooth extraction is the sixth most common reason for admittance to hospital for general anaesthesia (GA) for the under 5s and the single most common reason for children aged 5–9 years old.2 These figures are reflected across Europe, the USA and beyond. The consequences of the disease have significant impacts on children’s daily lives. These include pain,3 interference with sleep and loss of time4 from school. Around 50% of children aged 12 and 15 years old report toothache, and around a quarter of them experience difficulty eating. Dental caries can also affect the general health and quality of life of children, impairing growth and cognitive development, and interfering with nutrition and school attendance.5 In 2013, 6% of 12-year-olds and 3% of 15-year-olds reported difficulty with schoolwork because of the condition of their teeth and mouth over the previous 3 months.6 Dental caries affects one in three 12-year-olds in the UK. It has a positive association with …
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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".