Self-perceived Oral Health Status and Oral Healthcare Services Utilization among an Underserved Sample of Pregnant Women in London, Ontario.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Oral health during pregnancy is of high importance because of the impacts physiological alterations have on oral health and because adverse pregnancy outcomes can result from oral and dental conditions. Previous studies demonstrated a high dental visit avoidance among pregnant women due to barriers such as cost and misbeliefs.\nObjectives: The main objective of this thesis was to investigate the unmet dental and oral needs during pregnancy, and associated factors, through two complementary studies.\nMethods: A systematic literature review was conducted regarding misbeliefs about oral health and dental visits during pregnancy. A survey-based study was conducted on a clinic-based sample of pregnant women in London, Ontario.\nResults: The most common misbeliefs discussed in the 45 studies included in our Systematic Review were related to the safety of dental care services utilization and treatments, and the supposed impacts of pregnancy on oral health. The pilot study recruited 67 of 76 eligible subjects, of whom 76.1% reported having good to excellent oral health and 82.1% had visited a dentist within the last two years. Of 51 who had no dental visit during pregnancy, 12 believed it was not necessary, while cost was a barrier for 18 individuals. Age (p=0.001), education (p=0.003), and dental flossing frequency (p=0.035) were significantly associated with self-reported oral health. Women with dental insurance (p=0.022) and good to excellent oral health status (p=0.029) were more likely to have visited a dentist within the last two years. Oral health status and dental visit patterns of the study sample were poorer than the Canadian general population, and may reflect the clinic which was a disadvantaged population.\nConclusion: Educational interventions regarding oral health awareness and policies improving access to dental insurance may improve the unmet oral and dental needs and access to dental care services. Further analyses of more diverse populations and larger samples are required to provide a better understanding of the unmet oral needs and dental visit patterns during pregnancy.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".