Dental caries in Saudi Arabia: A systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: In KSA, numerous studies are conducted to measure the prevalence of dental caries. However, the prevalence of dental caries varies in KSA. This systematic review aims to improve the understanding of the prevalence of dental caries among adults and children residing in KSA. METHODS: Online databases of MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library were searched. The Saudi Dental Journal was hand-searched. Study selection and data extraction were conducted in duplicate. The studies on dental caries in the Saudi population were included. The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) was used to assess the quality of the selected studies. Finally, a narrative synthesis was conducted. RESULTS: Forty-nine cross-sectional studies were identified. Areas of weakness in study design/conduct were low response rates, reliable outcome measurement, and identification and handling of confounding factors. Statistical pooling of data was not appropriate due to substantial heterogeneity, also in part to a variation in geographical location and the target population. Twenty-nine studies presented data for primary dentition. The proportion of dental caries among primary teeth ranged from 0.21 to 1.00. Eighteen studies presented data for permanent dentition. The proportion of dental caries across permanent teeth ranged from 0.05 to 0.99. CONCLUSIONS: In general, the methodological quality of the included studies was poor. Dental caries proportion level ranged from 0.05 to 0.99 in permanent teeth, and 0.21 to 1.00 across primary teeth. The available data does not provide a complete assessment of dental caries across KSA. Existing studies are limited in terms of the populations studied for dental caries.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".