EFFECTIVENESS OF ASSISTED TOOTHBRUSHING ON PRESCHOOLERS’ ORAL HYGIENE: A CAREGIVER-INTERVENTION APPROACH
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To assess the effectiveness of an intervention on caregivers' assisted toothbrushing techniques and oral health maintenance for preschool-aged children, and to determine whether these effects differ by age. METHODS: A single group pre/post intervention study was conducted among children aged 3-5 years and their caregivers in Callao, Peru. Eligible caregivers were trained on assisted toothbrushing using large and real-scale typodonts, along with practical demonstrations by a dentist. Additionally, they were instructed on healthy practices and oral health in children. Children's oral hygiene status (OHS) was assessed using the Simplified Oral Hygiene Index (OHI-S) at baseline and three months postintervention. To assess the effectiveness and quantify the magnitude of the difference between the OHI-S before and after the intervention, we used Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the Cliff's Delta test, respectively. Results were stratified by age group to examine potential differences. RESULTS: The sample (n = 210) predominantly comprised 3-year-old Peruvian females, primarily cared for by their mothers, who identified as single mothers who had not previously received instruction in oral hygiene practices. We found improvement in children's OHI-S in most age groups. Specifically, among 3-year-olds, the OHI-S score improved significantly from 'fair' (m = 2.6, ± 0.2, range 2.4-2.8) to 'good' (m = 1.1, ± 0.2, range 0.9-1.3). The intervention showed a moderate effect size (δ = -0.15, 95% CI -0.18, -0.10) in the 3-year-olds and a moderate effect size (δ = -0.05, 95% CI -0.08, -0.01) in the 4-year-olds. No significant improvements were observed in the 5-year-old group. CONCLUSION: A caregiver-focused intervention significantly improved OHS among preschool-aged children, particularly in younger age groups. Substantial improvements in OHI-S scores were noted for 3- and 4-year-olds, while age-specific factors may have limited efficacy in the 5-year-old group. These findings highlight the importance of early, targeted oral health education for caregivers.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".