Children's dental anxiety in the United Kingdom in 2003.

Background: The prevalence of dental anxiety among a representative sample of children in the UK was determined in the Children's Dental Health survey of 2003.

Aims: This paper is concerned with the extent to which children in the United Kingdom are judged by a parent or carer to be behaviourally affected by dental anxiety and the factors associated with this.

Method: The information was gathered by self-completion questionnaire distributed to the parents of half of the sample of children who were also clinically examined in the dental survey.

Effect of a 1-month vs. a 12-month reference period on responses to the 14-item Oral Health Impact Profile.

The length of the reference period used in surveys of subjective oral health may have a marked influence on the responses obtained. We aimed to evaluate the effect of a 1-month (RP-1) vs. a 12-month (RP-12) reference period in the Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP-14) questionnaire.

Patients' experiences with partial dentures: a qualitative study.

Objective: The aim of the study was to gain insight into people's experiences of being given and using partial dentures.

Methods: In-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with 23 people of varied age, social background and denture wearing experience in Tayside, Scotland. Participants were encouraged to discuss how they came to have partial dentures, their day-to-day denture use and their interactions with dentists.

Can dental epidemiological information be gathered during routine dental examinations by general dental practitioners?

Objective: To assess the feasibility of gathering dental epidemiological information by General Dental Practitioners during routine dental examinations.

Design And Sample: Ten General Dental Practitioners (GDPs) and five Community Dental Officers (previously trained as dental examiners for epidemiological purposes) performed dental examinations of the same 10 volunteer adult patients in order to record decayed, missing and filled teeth.

Results: Agreement assessed by the kappa statistic showed that both the previously trained dental examiners and the GDPs assessed tooth conditions other than tooth decay consistently.

How do age and tooth loss affect oral health impacts and quality of life? A study comparing two national samples.

Age and loss of teeth can be expected to have a complex relationship with oral health-related quality of life. This study aimed to explain how age and tooth loss affect the impact of oral health on daily living using the short form, 14-item Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP-14) on national population samples of dentate adults from the UK (1998 UK Adult Dental Health Survey) and Australia (1999 National Dental Telephone Interview Survey). After correcting for key covariables, increasing age was associated with better mean impact scores in both populations.

Predicting the experience of dentinal caries or restorative dental treatment in adolescents using D1 and D3 visual caries assessments.

Standardised epidemiological caries assessments used in oral health surveys have been shown to be poor at predicting whether a tooth surface will be treated restoratively when a patient visits a dentist. However, it has been argued that oral health surveys may be more relevant in determining needs at the level of an individual or groups of individuals. The objective of this study was to determine the discriminatory power of visual caries assessments at two thresholds (D1 & D3) in adolescents of average age 12.