Oral hygiene practices and utilization of oral healthcare services among in-school adolescents in Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: oral health mirrors an individual´s general health, hence, proper care should be taken to prevent oral diseases and conditions. An estimated 3.9 billion people worldwide are affected by oral conditions, and adolescents are at increased risk due to diet choices and hormonal changes. This study aimed at determining the oral hygiene practices, awareness and utilization of oral healthcare services among in-school adolescents in Calabar Municipality. METHODS: a descriptive cross-sectional study design was employed in studying these variables among in-school adolescents (10-19 years) in secondary schools (JSS1-SSS2) using a self-administered, semi-structured questionnaire. Data were entered and analyzed with EPI-Info. Cross tabulations of variables were conducted using Chi-square test with significance level of 5%. RESULTS: a total of 335 students participated in the study with 228 (68.1%) and 136 (40.6%) reporting that they are aware of and have utilized oral healthcare services (OHS), respectively. There was no statistically significant association between age (p=0.923), gender (p=0.351) and type of school (p=0.497) respectively with awareness and utilization of OHS. Toothache/pain and presumed good dental health respectively were the main reasons for the usage and non-utilization of these services. Time-to-use of oral health services after the onset of toothache/pain was within five days (75.7%). CONCLUSION: the utilization rate of OHS did not match up to the level of awareness of these services with pain being the main driver for utilization. Increased awareness of oral healthcare through health education and oral healthcare demonstrations among adolescents is highly recommended as part of school health programs.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".