A methodological study to assess the measurement properties (reliability and validity) of a caries risk assessment tool for young children.

Objectives: To assess the CAMBRA caries risk assessment tool (CRAT) in terms of its measurement properties: reliability, validity and responsiveness to change in caries estimates over time.

Methods: Secondary data from the VicGeneration (VicGen) birth cohort study were used. Caries risk status at child age18 months was compared against caries development at 36 and 48 months.

Identifying predictors of early childhood caries among Australian children using sequential modelling: Findings from the VicGen birth cohort study.

Objectives: The aim of this birth cohort study was to identify concurrent associations between early childhood caries and putative risk and protective factors.

Methods: Data were collected in seven waves over five years. The study outcome measure, dmfs, was modelled in a set of sequential negative binomial regressions that introduced the variables in steps starting from health determinants most distal to the child and ending with the more proximal ones.

Familiarity with social sounds alters c-Fos expression in auditory cortex and interacts with estradiol in locus coeruleus.

When a social sound category initially gains behavioral significance to an animal, plasticity events presumably enhance the ability to recognize that sound category in the future. In the context of learning natural social stimuli, neuromodulators such as norepinephrine and estrogen have been associated with experience-dependent plasticity and processing of newly salient social cues, yet continued plasticity once stimuli are familiar could disrupt the stability of sensorineural representations. Here we employed a maternal mouse model of natural sensory cortical plasticity for infant vocalizations to ask whether the engagement of the noradrenergic locus coeruleus (LC) by the playback of pup-calls is affected by either prior experience with the sounds or estrogen availability, using a well-studied cellular activity and plasticity marker, the immediate early gene c-Fos.