A multicenter study of oral health behavior among adult subjects from three South American cities

This study aimed to examine 20-year trends (1994–2014) in self-reported oral health and oral hygiene and to assess the associated factors in a Lithuanian population aged 20–64 years. Nationally representative cross-sectional data on 8612 men and 11,719 women were obtained from 11 biennial postal surveys of Lithuanian health behavior monitoring. Dentate status was assessed by asking about the number of missing teeth. Over the study period, the proportion of men with all teeth increased from 17.5% to 23.0% and the same proportion increased in women—from 12.5% to 19.6%. The prevalence of edentulousness was 2.8% in 2014. The proportion of individuals brushing teeth at least twice a day increased from 14.6% to 31.9% in men and from 33.0% to 58.8% in women. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that older age, lower education, living in rural areas, daily smoking, confectionary consumption (only in women), obesity, no visits to a dentist during the past year, toothache and brushing teeth less than twice a day increased the odds of missing six or more teeth. Efforts should be made to promote good oral hygiene habits, prevent and control behavioral risk factors and increase access to dental care among risk groups.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Self-Reported Oral Health, Oral Hygiene and Associated Factors in Lithuanian Adult Population, 1994–2014

Raskilienė

Kriaučionienė

Siudikienė

et al. 2020

“…Although the mechanistic explanation for this association is still under debate, it reinforces that oral health self-assessment might play a role as a proxy variable for other health conditions. Finally, the variable "brushing the teeth more than four times a day" in our findings mirrors a high standard of self-care in Latin America [19]. We speculate that this standard of self-care is also extrapolated to other variables related to general health.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 63%

Potential Confounders in the Analysis of Brazilian Adolescent’s Health: A Combination of Machine Learning and Graph Theory

Oku

Morais

Bueno

et al. 2019

The prevalence of health problems during childhood and adolescence is high in developing countries such as Brazil. Social inequality, violence, and malnutrition have strong impact on youth health. To better understand these issues we propose to combine machine-learning methods and graph analysis to build predictive networks applied to the Brazilian National Student Health Survey (PenSE 2015) data, a large dataset that consists of questionnaires filled by the students. By using a combination of gradient boosting machines and centrality hub metric, it was possible to identify potential confounders to be considered when conducting association analyses among variables. The variables were ranked according to their hub centrality to predict the other variables from a directed weighted-graph perspective. The top five ranked confounder variables were "gender", "oral health care", "intended education level", and two variables associated with nutrition habits-"eat while watching TV" and "never eat fast-food". In conclusion, although causal effects cannot be inferred from the data, we believe that the proposed approach might be a useful tool to obtain novel insights on the association between variables and to identify general factors related to health conditions.

“…Such data indicated that patients were aware of bleeding after toothbrushing and may seek professional treatment only when they already suffered from generalized gingival inflammation. Among Swedish and South American adults, self-reported bleeding resulted in sensitivity ranging from 0.42 to 0.51 for a threshold of ≥50% of bleeding sites [9,47]. After dichotomizing as less and more than 40% of bleeding sites, the sensitivity for occasional bleeding was 0.88 in a Scottish sample of adult patients [15].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Interestingly, adults aged 60 to 75 years were less likely to self-perceive the symptoms of gingival disease correctly compared to young people. Studies have shown that older people in general tend to overestimate their own oral health compared to young and middle-aged adults, despite the age-associated decline in health status [47,[50][51][52]. The factors that affect self-reported oral health are somewhat unclear, but it has been suggested that subjective reactions to oral conditions strongly influence self-perceived oral health and that this is likely more pronounced in the younger age groups [52].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-Perception of Periodontal Health and Associated Factors: A Cross-Sectional Population-Based Study

Romano

Perotto

Bianco

et al. 2020

The aim of this cross-sectional study was to explore sociodemographic, behavioral, and clinical factors associated with self-awareness of periodontal health. Data were collected from a representative sample of 736 adults (25-75 years old) in a city of Northern Italy who self-assessed gingival bleeding, oral malodor, and tooth mobility in a questionnaire and who underwent clinical periodontal examination and organoleptic evaluation. Approximately 50% of the subjects were aware of their actual gingival health status and oral odor. The logistic regression analysis revealed that females presented higher odds of correctly perceiving their gingival conditions and mouth odor, while those who were older and smokers had a greater probability of being less objective in reporting them. Tooth type and position in the dental arches were positively associated with self-perception of tooth mobility. These findings reflected a low level of self-awareness that may influence oral care-seeking behavior. Subjects may be unconcerned about their periodontal health condition or lack enough knowledge to be aware of it. This points to the need for planning strategies to improve education and knowledge about periodontal health, which, by enhancing self-perception of periodontal symptoms, could help everyone to seek treatment in the initial stage of the disease. population and individual level [8]. In larger populations, a combination of demographic measures and self-reported oral health questions (self-perceived assessment) has demonstrated promising validity in predicting periodontitis for planning public health programs, especially when clinical assessment is unattainable [9][10][11][12]. In individuals, clinical and self-reported measures of periodontal disease have been reported to demonstrate significant disparity [13,14].A recent contribution provided evidence of low sensitivity (disease perception), but high specificity (health perception) values for self-reported bleeding gums [13,14] and low to moderate sensitivity and specificity for oral malodor [15][16][17][18], while little is known about self-perceived tooth mobility [15,16,19,20]. In contrast, people demonstrated the ability to refer to their own dental history, number of remaining teeth, previous experience of restorations, presence of prostheses, and screening of urgent dental care [6,9,[21][22][23][24].Several studies have shown that self-perception of oral health varies among social groups and age cohorts [13,25,26], although these findings have not been corroborated in other studies [27,28]. Most of the available information is derived from older participants, especially community dwelling or institutionalized individuals [29][30][31], while representative samples of adult populations were seldom involved, and none of them assessed predictors of gingival health and oral odor self-awareness [5,10,32]. Self-awareness of periodontal health status influences oral health-seeking behavior and is related to the utilization of dental services for early detection and prevention...