Presence of management, entrepreneurship, leadership and marketing topics in the dental school curriculum in Brazil.

INTRODUCTION: To analyse the presence and characteristics of curricular components related to management, entrepreneurship, leadership and marketing as part of the structure and teaching methods of undergraduate courses in dentistry in Brazil. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This is an observational study that used the Ministry of Education's Undergraduate Course Accreditation Platform, which included 424 undergraduate courses in Dentistry on the last date of collection (August 31 2019). The following items were analysed as follows: the existence of curricular components in relation to the proposed themes, the most recurring denominations of curricular components, minimum and maximum workload, mandatory/optional classification, theoretical/practical teaching condition and in which year the curricular components were inserted. RESULTS: 367/424 (86.6%) of dentistry courses in Brazil included at least one of the topics: management, entrepreneurship, leadership and marketing curricular components in their curriculum, whilst 57/424 (13.4%) did not have these curricular components in their curricular structure. The most frequent names were "Management" 99 (45.21%) and "Entrepreneurship" 80 (36.5%). There was a predominance of the "theoretical method" and the number of hours varied considerably, with the most common course hours between 40 and 60 h. The majority of curricular components were inserted in the third to fifth year and offered on a compulsory basis. CONCLUSION: Most curricular matrices of dentistry courses in Brazil had components related to the topics studied. However, due to the variety of curricular components' names, hours, periods of courses and different teaching methodologies, there is a need to redesign the teaching and learning process, defining educational and evaluation models with common curricular components.

Association between life conditions and vulnerability with mortality from cardiovascular diseases in elderly men of Northeast Brazil.

The study aimed at identifying explanatory factors of the mortality rate of elderly men due to cardiovascular diseases in the 187 micro regions of Northeast Brazil, in 2000, based on indicators of life conditions and vulnerability of that population, using the structural equations modeling. The following methodological steps were taken: (1) using Censo 2000's microdata, 10 indicators were selected to the latent exogenous construct 'life conditions and vulnerability'. Using the Information System of Mortality from the Brazilian Ministry of Health, data about deaths from the four major basic causes of cardiovascular diseases were collected, which composed the endogenous latent construct as the outcome variable; (2) qualitative analysis of mortality data; (3) statistical analysis using the structural equation modeling through two phases: adjustment of the outcome variables measurement model and adjustment of the obtained structural model. Due to the multicollinearity observed, three indicators showed significance for the measurement model: years of study, percentage of elderly men in households with bathroom/plumbing and survival probability at 60 years of age. The structural model indicated adjustment adequacy of the model, which the measurement of standardized coefficient was considered of strong effect (SC = 0.81, p-value < 0.01) and coefficient of determination r2 = 66%. It was concluded that indicators of life conditions and vulnerability were highly associated with the mortality rate from cardiovascular diseases in elderly men from Northeast Brazil in 2000.