The Burden of Early Childhood Caries in Canadian Children and Associated Risk Factors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Early childhood caries (ECC) is one of the important caries occurring in children under the age of six. ECC common in many population groups in Canada. Objective: The purpose of this review was to identify the burden of ECC in Canada, prevalence of ECC and its impact on childhood health, and associated risk factors for ECC. Methods: A systematic review was conducted to review published Canadian studies on ECC identified through searches of electronic databases. Databased searched included PubMed, Medline, Cinahl and the library catalogue of the University of Manitoba. Known publications on ECC that were not identified by the electronic search were also considered. Only the studies that reported the prevalence of ECC or caries in preschool aged children were considered. In-depth assessments were restricted to those studies that employed logistic regression analysis to investigate relationship between ECC and risk factors or nutritional status and quality of life. Results: A total of 36 studies were identified that related to ECC in Canadian children. Overall, 27 related to prevalence and 12 reported on risk factors, 4 related to the association between severe ECC and nutritional health and well-being, while only 1 related to the oral microbiome composition. Published studies reveal that anywhere from zero to 98% of children in Canada may be affected by ECC. Commonly identified risk factors include age, sex, socio-economic status, parental beliefs, family characteristics, debris/plaque and behavioural (oral health or feeding behaviours). Enamel hypoplasia also appears to be strongly associated with ECC. Conclusions: Many Canadian children are affected by ECC in the infant and preschool periods. ECC appears to be strongly associated with “social determinants of health”, child’s age at first dental visit, and parental beliefs about child’s oral health. Enamel hypoplasia is also a strong risk factor, but, unfortunately, not commonly assessed in studies on ECC in Canada. Multiple logistic regression should become standard practice to identify true risk factors for ECC as this methodology can help to control for confounders.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".