Two-Year Trajectories of Dental Anxiety in Parents and Their Association with Parents' and Children's Oral Healthcare Procedures in FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study.

We aimed to identify parents' dental anxiety trajectories and the association of the trajectories with the number of parents' and their children's oral healthcare procedures in the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study. Dental anxiety was measured with the Modified Dental Anxiety Scale at gestational weeks (gw) 14 and 34, as well as 3 and 24 months (mo) after childbirth. Oral healthcare procedures from gw14 to 24 mo were obtained from the national patient data register and categorized as preventive and treatment. Trajectories were identified with latent growth mixture modelling for 2068 fathers and 3201 mothers. Associations between trajectories and procedures adjusted for education were analyzed using unordered multinomial logit models. Fathers' trajectories were stable low (80.1%), stable high (3.4%), stable moderate (11.0%), moderate increasing (3.9%) and high decreasing (1.6%). Mothers' trajectories were stable low (80.7%), stable high (11.2%), moderate increasing (5.3%) and high decreasing (2.8%). Mothers with decreasing dental anxiety had a higher number of preventive and treatment procedures. Fathers with decreasing dental anxiety had a higher number of preventive and treatment procedures, while fathers with increasing dental anxiety had fewer procedures. Children of mothers with stable low dental anxiety had higher number of preventive procedures. There seems to be a two-way association between dental anxiety trajectories and oral healthcare procedures.

Is the oral health-related quality of life associated with quality of life among pregnant Finnish families: a cross-sectional study.

OBJECTIVE: The objectives of this study was to find out if oral health-related quality of life and its dimensions (OHRQoL) are associated with overall quality of life (QoL) among mothers and fathers during pregnancy and whether these two constructs were associated within the family sharing the same living environment. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The data (mothers n = 2580, fathers n = 1467) for this cross-sectional data study were collected from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort study during 2011-2015. OHRQoL was measured using a 14-item Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP-14) questionnaire and QoL by using the WHOQoL-Bref questionnaire. Spearman correlation coefficients were used to assess the statistical significance of the associations. RESULTS: OHRQoL was weakly associated at the individual level with the overall QoL (mothers r = 0.21, fathers r = 0.22, p < 0.001), but the correlations within families were low for QoL and OHRQoL. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that overall QoL is a different construct than OHRQoL though slightly overlapping.

Spectroscopic Detection of Caries Lesions.

Background. A caries lesion causes changes in the optical properties of the affected tissue. Currently a caries lesion can be detected only at a relatively late stage of development. Caries diagnosis also suffers from high interobserver variance. Methods. This is a pilot study to test the suitability of an optical diffuse reflectance spectroscopy for caries diagnosis. Reflectance visible/near-infrared spectroscopy (VIS/NIRS) was used to measure caries lesions and healthy enamel on extracted human teeth. The results were analysed with a computational algorithm in order to find a rule-based classification method to detect caries lesions. Results. The classification indicated that the measured points of enamel could be assigned to one of three classes: healthy enamel, a caries lesion, and stained healthy enamel. The features that enabled this were consistent with theory. Conclusions. It seems that spectroscopic measurements can help to reduce false positives at in vitro setting. However, further research is required to evaluate the strength of the evidence for the method's performance.