Comparison between undergraduate dental students' self-assessment of pre-clinical crown preparation and assessment by two tutors

Abstract: objective: to determine the prevalence of carious lesions and gingivitis in 2- to 4-year-old children attending JUNJI daycare centers and urban municipal schools in the city of Valdivia, Chile. material and method: descriptive cross-sectional study. a population of 182 two-year-old children and 285 four-year-old children were examined. subjects were selected by stratified random sampling. all subjects were enrolled in daycare centers managed by JUNJI and municipal schools in the city of Valdivia. an oral examination was performed to measure the DMFT and hemorrhagic indexes according to the WHO diagnostic criteria. the presence of cavitated carious lesions and gingivitis was determined, resulting in descriptive statistics according to age and gender. results: the prevalence of caries was 12.6 percent in two-year-old children and 41 percent in four-year-olds, respectively. the prevalence of gingivitis was 36.8 percent at 2 years of age and 70.5 percent at 4 years. there were no significant differences by gender at 2 years of age (p=1) or at 4 years (p=0.37). two year-old children have significantly fewer carious lesions and gingivitis less frequently than four-year-olds (p=<.001). conclusion: two year-old children have a lower prevalence of carious lesions and gingivitis than four-year-old ones. no relationship between the variables and gender was found.

Impact of the IL-18 gene polymorphism in response to antiviral therapy in chronic HCV genotype 4 patients

Introduction Interleukin (IL)-18 is a well-known major proinflammatory cytokine with broad biological effects. The major immunomodulatory functions of IL-18 include enhancing T cell and natural killer cell cytotoxicity. Serum levels of this cytokine were shown to increase in chronic hepatitis C patients compared to non-infected healthy people. An association between IL-18 gene promoter polymorphisms and pegylated interferon (PEG-IFN) and ribavirin treatment outcomes has been reported for individuals with chronic hepatitis C virus genotype 1 (HCV-1). In this study, HCV genotype 4 (HCV-4) patients were assessed for IL-18 gene polymorphisms and treatment outcomes or severity of liver disease because data concerning the impact of IL-18 gene polymorphisms on patients with HCV-4 infections are limited. Methods This study included 123 chronic HCV-4 Egyptian patients and 123 apparently healthy volunteer blood donors who served as a control group. HCV genotyping was performed using the line probe assay. IL-18 genotyping was performed using the TaqMan Real-Time PCR method in all 246 patient and control samples. Results In our study, all patients had HCV-4. IL-18 gene single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) (-607C/A) genotype distributions and allele frequencies did not differ between HCV patients and normal healthy subjects or between patient groups when compared according to the therapeutic response. Moreover, the presence of an IL-18 SNP was not associated with histological disease severity. We conclude that the presence of the IL-18 SNP rs1946518 does not affect the outcome of chronic HCV-4 treatment in Egyptian patients. Conclusions The IL-18 SNP rs1946518 does not affect response to treatment in chronic HCV-4 patients. .