Analysis of nutritional status and oral veillonella in caries-free and caries-affected preschool children in Manitoba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Early childhood caries (ECC) is a widespread, multifactorial disease. Dental decay is a result of low-pH demineralization caused by acidogenic bacteria living in oral biofilms. Nutrition is a key determinant of ECC, as these bacteria require fermentable carbohydrates to grow. Veillonella are important bacteria that facilitate the activity of acidogenic bacteria by removing excess lactate products. A majority of oral microbiome studies focus on the importance of well-known cariogenic bacteria, such as Streptococcus mutans, while few studies have characterized Veillonella in ECC. The purpose of this study was to gain a greater understanding of the relationship between nutrition, oral Veillonella, and ECC. Methods: A case-control study design was used. The nutritional profiles of 158 children (75 caries-free, 83 with ECC) from Manitoba were determined via NutriSTEP (Nutrition Screening Tool for Every Preschooler and Toddler). Veillonella species were assessed using relative abundance data from 16S rRNA sequencing of dental plaque samples. A multivariable logistic regression model was used to estimate the association of ECC with NutriSTEP scores and relative abundance of Veillonella. Results: Caries-affected children tended to be older, established residents, Indigenous, live in rural or remote areas, and have less-educated parents (p ≤ 0.05). Children with ECC had higher total NutriSTEP scores (23.7 ± 6.8) than children without ECC (21.1 ± 6.6; p ≤ 0.05). Relative abundance data revealed significantly higher levels of Veillonella dispar, Streptococcus mutans, and Streptococcus salivarius in caries-affected children (p ≤ 0.05). Children with a high abundance of Veillonella parvula (OR = 2.33; 95% CI: 1.10, 4.91) and greater nutritional risk/NutriSTEP scores (OR = 1.08; 95% CI: 1.02, 1.14) were more likely to experience ECC than children with insignificant levels of the bacteria and lower nutritional risk/NutriSTEP scores. Conclusions: Our findings reflect the importance of Veillonella dispar and Veillonella parvula for ECC, and support a tentative association between oral Veillonella, nutrition, and dental caries. Children with abundant oral Veillonella and greater nutritional risk may be more susceptible to ECC. Future research including metagenomic and mechanistic studies are needed to characterize the causative role of Veillonella in ECC.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".