Oral Health Beliefs, Attitudes, and Practices of South Asian Migrants: A Systematic Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Oral health is a burden among all populations and is linked with major chronic diseases such as cardiovascular diseases. Migrants, in particular South Asians, have poor oral health which requires further understanding to better inform oral health interventions by targeting specific aspects of this heterogenous South Asian population. This review is undertaken to systematically synthesize the evidence of oral health understandings, knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, practices, and behaviors of South Asian migrants residing in high-income countries. A comprehensive systematic search of seven electronic databases and hand-searching for peer-reviewed studies was conducted. All study designs were included, and quality assessment conducted. Of the 1614 records identified, 17 were included for synthesis and 12 were quantitative in design. These studies were primarily conducted in the UK, USA, Canada, and Europe. South Asian migrants had inadequate oral health knowledge, attitudes, and practices—influenced by culture, social norms, and religiosity. In the absence of symptoms, preventive oral hygiene practices were limited. Barriers to access varied with country of origin; from lack of trust in dentists and treatment cost in studies with India as the country of origin, to religiosity, among poorer nations such as Bangladesh. Fewer studies focused on recent arrivals from Bhutan or the Maldives. Culturally and socially appropriate strategies must be developed to target oral health issues and a “one-size” fits all approach will be ineffective in addressing the needs of South Asian migrants.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".