The Impact of Parenting Styles on Pediatric Dental Behavior and Anxiety in the Dental Operatory.

Purpose: To understand the relationship and impact of the parenting styles of mothers on the behavior and anxiety in the dental operatory of eight- to 12-year-old children. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted with 50 mother-child dyads. A short version of the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire was used to assess parenting style, while the Modified Dental Anxiety Scale and Frankl's Behavior Rating Scale were used to assess dental anxiety and behavior. Results: Forty-six percent of children (n=23) were male. Sixty-four percent of mothers had an authoritative parenting style, 20 percent were authoritarian and 16 percent had a permissive parenting style. A statistically significant negative relationship was observed between permissive parenting style (-0.392, P<0.005) and dental behavior, and between dental behavior and dental anxiety (-0.611, P<0.000). Regression analysis showed that parenting style had an impact of 14.5 percent on the behavior of the child in the dental operatory. Conclusion: Parenting styles, particularly permissive types, had a significant impact on a child???s dental behavior.

Oral Health Assessment of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Special Schools.

BACKGROUND: Sensory over-responsivity is an important factor influencing the ability of children with an autism spectrum disorder to receive proper oral care. Dental care remains the most prevalent, unmet health care need for children with special health care needs. AIM AND OBJECTIVE: To assess the oral health of children with autism in special schools. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted to record the oral health problems of 142 autistic children attending special schools across the suburbs of Mumbai city in India. Clinical examination was carried out for the presence of dental plaque, gingivitis, caries, restorations, traumatic injuries, and self-injurious habits. The participants were divided into three groups based on their age. RESULTS: Children with primary and mixed dentition had a higher incidence of dental caries when compared with the permanent dentition group. Good oral hygiene was observed in the study population with a mean OHI-S score of 0.88 ± 0.79. Traumatic dental injuries, bruxism, drooling of saliva from the corner of the mouth, and self-injurious habits were also recorded. CONCLUSION: Due to the nature of their neurological deficit and difficulty in providing dental treatment, it is recommended that preventive dental care be enforced on these children. HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Santosh A, Kakade A, Mali S, et al. Oral Health Assessment of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Special Schools. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent 2021;14(4):548-553.

A novel fuzzy rough selection of non-linearly extracted features for schizophrenia diagnosis using fMRI.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Schizophrenia is a severe brain disorder primarily diagnosed through externally observed behavioural symptoms due to the dearth of established clinical tests. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can capture the distortions caused by schizophrenia in the brain activation. Hence, it can be useful for developing a decision model that performs computer-aided diagnosis of schizophrenia. But, fMRI data is huge in dimension. Therefore dimension reduction is indispensable. It is additionally required to identify the discriminative brain regions. Hence, we aim to build an effective decision model that incorporates suitable dimension reduction and also identifies discriminative brain regions. METHODS: We propose a three-phase dimension reduction. First phase involves spatially-constrained fuzzy clustering of 3-dimensional spatial maps (obtained from general linear model and independent component analysis). In the second phase, non-linear features are extracted from each cluster using a generalized discriminant analysis. In the third phase, a novel fuzzy rough feature selection is proposed. The features obtained after the third phase are used for learning a decision model by the help of support vector machine classifier. This complete method is implemented within leave-one-out cross-validation on two balanced datasets (respectively acquired on 1.5Tesla and 3Tesla scanners). Both these datasets are created using Function Biomedical Informatics Research Network multisite data and contain fMRI data acquired during auditory oddball task performed by age-matched schizophrenia patients and healthy subjects. A permutation test is also carried out to ensure that no bias is involved in the learning. RESULTS: The results indicate that the proposed method achieves maximum classification accuracy of 97.1% and 98.0% for the two datasets respectively. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The results of the permutation test show that p-values are lesser than the significance level i.e. 0.05. Therefore, the classifier has found a significant class structure and does not involve any bias. Further, discriminative brain regions are identified and are in agreement with the findings in related literature. CONCLUSION: The proposed method is able to derive suitable non-linear features and the related brain regions for effective computer-aided diagnosis. The fuzzy and rough set based approaches help in handling uncertainty and ambiguity in real data.

An unusual association of extraoral sinus tract with unerupted permanent tooth.

Cases have been reported in the literature in which extraoral sinus tracts of dental origin have been diagnosed and successfully treated. Similarly, the presence of an intracoronal radiolucency in unerupted permanent teeth has been found in the dental literature. The association of one with the other, however, is a rare occurrence. The purpose of this case report was to describe the treatment of a 7-year-old child who presented with an extraoral draining sinus originating from a carious, developing tooth bud of the unerupted permanent mandibular left second molar. After a thorough clinical and radiographic examination, a conclusive diagnosis was determined and surgical treatment was performed. The patient responded well, and the cutaneous lesion healed uneventfully.