Unmet Dental Needs in Children Following Suspension of School‐Based Oral Health Services Due to COVID ‐19
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Abstract
Background
Dental caries (tooth decay) is the world's most prevalent noncommunicable disease and can lead to pain, infection, and edentulism. Many children with caries lack access to traditional dental services. School‐based caries prevention can increase access to care and reduce health inequities. Disruptions in school‐based care due to pandemic control policies may result in children losing access to their primary dental care option.
Methods
The CariedAway project was a school‐based caries prevention program in operation from 2019 to 2023 in urban schools with a high proportion of low‐income, minority students. Program operations were suspended for 2 years due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. We estimated the prevalence of untreated decay, swelling, fistula, and pulpal involvement in participants at baseline and again after restrictions were lifted.
Results
A total of 2998 children between the ages of 5 and 13 years were enrolled and received preventive care prior to pandemic shutdowns, and 1398 (47%) completed a follow‐up observation after 2 years. At baseline, approximately 30% had untreated caries on any dentition, 11% of children presented with evidence of dental sealants, and no participants had swelling, fistula, or pulpal involvement. After 24 months, 12% of participants had swelling fistula, or pulpal involvement that was not treated during the pandemic period.
Conclusion
There are considerable unmet dental needs in high‐risk children that may be further exacerbated by a lack of access to care during disease outbreaks.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2022.05.16.22275165: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: The trial is registered at www.clinicaltrials.gov (#NCT03442309), received IRB approval from the New York School of Medicine Institutional Review Board (#i17-00578), and has a published study protocol [9].
Consent: All students in enrolled schools were eligible for the study if they provided parental informed consent and child assent.Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization A cluster randomized trial, schools were randomly allocated to receive each intervention. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share …
SciScore for 10.1101/2022.05.16.22275165: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: The trial is registered at www.clinicaltrials.gov (#NCT03442309), received IRB approval from the New York School of Medicine Institutional Review Board (#i17-00578), and has a published study protocol [9].
Consent: All students in enrolled schools were eligible for the study if they provided parental informed consent and child assent.Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization A cluster randomized trial, schools were randomly allocated to receive each intervention. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: We found the following clinical trial numbers in your paper:
Identifier Status Title NCT03442309 Recruiting Comparative Effectiveness of School-based Caries Prevention Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a protocol registration statement.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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