Adolescents with worse levels of oral health literacy have more cavitated carious lesions

Laio da Costa Dutra, Larissa Chaves Morais de Lima, Érick Tássio Barbosa Neves, Monalisa Cesarino Gomes, Luíza Jordânia Serafim de Araújo, Franklin Delano Soares Forte, Saul Martins Paiva, Fernanda Morais Ferreira and Ana Flávia Granville-Garcia

PLOS ONE, 2019, vol. 14, issue 11, 1-11

Abstract: The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the ability to recognize and read oral health terms is associated with the number of teeth with cavitated carious lesions in adolescents. A population-based cross-sectional study was conducted involving a sample of 746 adolescents representative of students aged 15 to 19 years at the public and private school systems in a city in northeast Brazil. Two examiners who had undergone a training and calibration exercise (inter-examiner and intra-examiner Kappa coefficient: 0.87 to 0.93) performed the diagnosis of caries using the Nyvad Index and evaluated the level of OHL (BREALD-30) of the adolescents. The participants answered questions regarding their history of visits to the dentist and the parents/caregivers answered a questionnaire addressing socioeconomic characteristics. A directed acyclic graph was created to direct the selection of covariables for adjustments in the Poisson multiple regression analysis to test the association between dental caries and OHL (α = 5%). Cavitated carious lesions (codes 3 to 6 on the Nyvad index) were found in 41.6% of the adolescents. Only 29.4% had a high level of OHL (BREALD-30 scores between 23 and 30); 42.3% of the families belonged to the A-B social class and 93% of the adolescents had been to the dentist at least once in their lifetimes. In the multivariate analysis, adolescents with inadequate (PR: 1.69; 95% CI: 1.18–2.41; p = 0.004) and marginal (PR; 1.42; 95% CI: 1.01–1.99; p = 0.042) OHL and those in the lower social classes (C-D-E) (PR: 1.85; 95% CI: 1.39–2.47; p

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225176 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 25176&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0225176

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0225176

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().