Is the mode of childbirth delivery linked to the prevalence of early childhood caries? A systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: The mode of childbirth delivery can influence the child's future health and the aim of this study was to explore the association between the delivery mode and the prevalence of early childhood caries. METHODS: We searched the PubMed, Google Scholar and Cochrane databases up to September 15, 2020. Two independent reviewers screened the papers for relevance, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias with the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. We performed a random effects meta-analysis to pool the prevalence of early childhood caries according to the mode of delivery. RESULTS: The authors included 11 studies in the review, comprising 47,688 children with vaginal delivery and 10,994 with caesarean section (C-section). The publication years ranged from 1997 to 2020 and included birth cohorts, cross-sectional, register-based and case-control studies. We assessed three publications with low or moderate risk of bias. The median caries prevalence in the C-section group was 56.4% compared to 45.9% in the vaginal group and this difference was statistically significant (p < 0.05). The pooled overall odds ratio was 1.48 (95% CI 1.07-2.05) indicating a weak but statistically significant trend towards a higher caries occurrence among children delivered with C-section. The certainty of this finding was low due to heterogeneity and inconsistencies across the studies. CONCLUSION: We found a weak but inconsistent association between the mode of delivery and the prevalence of early childhood caries. Further studies based on representative, prospective cohorts reporting a standardized core outcome set are required to answer the research question with higher certainty.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.021 | 0.062 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.025 | 0.039 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| 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".