Observation and Assessment of the Parameters of Facial Esthetics in 6-year-old Children with Healthy Dentition.

Aim: This study was conducted to observe and assess the dental and facial parameters of esthetics in children with healthy dentition and evaluate whether they are comparable to those of adults. Materials and methods: An observational study included 70 children with ages ranging from 5 to 6 years who had come to the Department of Pediatric & Preventive Dentistry, Institute of Dental Studies & Technologies, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India, with intact primary dentition. Standardized photographs of the children were taken and evaluated. Their facial and dental parameters were recorded and compared to that of those of adults. Result: The relation of tooth and facial components was established, and it was found that they were not in the same proportion as those of adults. Conclusion: The proportions of facial and dental parameters of esthetics of children at 6 years of age are different from those of adults. Clinical significance: Since esthetic rehabilitation of primary teeth is becoming an important requisite of successful dental treatment, it is important to establish a standard guideline of dental and facial parameters for children for prosthetic rehabilitation. How to cite this article: Potsangbam D, Agarwal N, Jabin Z, et al. Observation and Assessment of the Parameters of Facial Esthetics in 6-year-old Children with Healthy Dentition. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent 2023;16(4):608-611.

Ethyl gallate isolated from phenol-enriched fraction of Caesalpinia mimosoides Lam. Promotes cutaneous wound healing: a scientific validation through bioassay-guided fractionation.

The tender shoots of Caesalpinia mimosoides Lam. are used ethnomedically by the traditional healers of Uttara Kannada district, Karnataka (India) for the treatment of wounds. The current study was aimed at exploring phenol-enriched fraction (PEF) of crude ethanol extract of tender shoots to isolate and characterize the most active bio-constituent through bioassay-guided fractionation procedure. The successive fractionation and sub-fractionation of PEF, followed by in vitro scratch wound, antimicrobial, and antioxidant activities, yielded a highly active natural antioxidant compound ethyl gallate (EG). In vitro wound healing potentiality of EG was evidenced by a significantly higher percentage of cell migration in L929 fibroblast cells (97.98 ± 0.46% at 3.81 µg/ml concentration) compared to a positive control group (98.44 ± 0.36%) at the 48th hour of incubation. A significantly higher rate of wound contraction (98.72 ± 0.41%), an elevated tensile strength of the incised wound (1,154.60 ± 1.42 g/mm2), and increased quantity of connective tissue elements were observed in the granulation tissues of the 1% EG ointment treated animal group on the 15th post-wounding day. The accelerated wound healing activity of 1% EG was also exhibited by histopathological examinations through Hematoxylin and Eosin, Masson's trichome, and Toluidine blue-stained sections. Significant up-regulation of enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidant contents (reduced glutathione, superoxide dismutase, and catalase) and down-regulation of oxidative stress marker (lipid peroxidation) clearly indicates the effective granular antioxidant activity of 1% EG in preventing oxidative damage to the skin tissues. Further, in vitro antimicrobial and antioxidant activities of EG supports the positive correlation with its enhanced wound-healing activity. Moreover, molecular docking and dynamics for 100 ns revealed the stable binding of EG with cyclooxygenase-2 (-6.2 kcal/mol) and matrix metalloproteinase-9 (-4.6 kcal/mol) and unstable binding with tumor necrosis factor-α (-7.2 kcal/mol), suggesting the potential applicability of EG in inflammation and wound treatment.

Comparative evaluation of antimicrobial efficacy of nanosilver solution, Azadirachta indica, sodium hypochlorite, and normal saline as root canal irrigants in primary teeth.

Background: Microorganisms are the main cause of pulpal and periapical diseases. Hence, the elimination of such potential microbes is achieved by endodontic treatment. Mechanical preparation is the main mechanism to reduce the bacterial load in canals which is enhanced by intracanal irrigants. Despite these procedures, some bacteria might persist within the canals. It is important to disinfect the pulp space and dentinal tubules thoroughly with an effective endodontic irrigant to prevent reinfection of a treated root canal. Aim: This study aimed to evaluate and compare the antimicrobial efficacy of nanosilver (NS) Solution, Azadirachta indica, sodium hypochlorite, and normal saline when used as irrigants in infected root canals of primary teeth. Settings and Design: The study was a prospective randomized control trial which was conducted as per the consort statement. Materials and Methods: Eighty pulpally involved primary teeth requiring endodontic treatment of children aged 5-12 years were selected for this study. The subjects were randomly allocated to 4 groups (3 irrigant and control groups) consisting of 20 children each where Group I = NS solution, Group II = A. indica, Group III = Sodium hypochlorite (2.5%), and Group IV = Control group. Microbiological samples were collected at the baseline (before irrigation) and postirrigation after biomechanical preparation using the selected irrigant. The samples were subjected to an anaerobic bacterial culture test. Microbial colonies were identified and expressed as colony forming units per milliliter. Statistical Analysis: Data were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance, Paired t-test, and Post hoc Bonferroni test. Results: NS solution showed the highest mean of 4.384 × 103 ± 1.019 followed by Sodium hypochlorite with a mean of 3.500 × 103 ± 1.193 and A. indica of 2.590 × 103 ± 0.778. Conclusion: Based on the results of this study, NS solution can be used as an alternative to other root canal irrigating solutions in primary teeth.

Effectiveness of Oral Probiotics in Reducing S. Mutans Count in Caries-active Children: A Comparison with Chlorhexidine and Herbal Mouthrinse (Hiora®).

Aim: The purpose of this study was to compare the reduction in salivary mutans streptococci counts and to evaluate any change in the salivary pH values after the use of oral probiotics, chlorhexidine, and herbal mouthrinse. Method: Oral probiotics, chlorhexidine, and herbal mouthrinse [Hiora®] were evaluated for their efficacy against S. mutans in 75 caries-active children, aged 6-14 years. Results: The values obtained were subjected to statistical analysis. Oral probiotics showed lesser reduction in the S. mutans count as compared to chlorhexidine but the values were statistically insignificant. Herbal mouthrinse was not as effective as the oral probiotics or chlorhexidine in reducing the S. mutans count. Conclusion: Oral probiotics show a similar efficacy as the gold standard, chlorhexidine, in reduction of oral S. mutans. How to cite this article: Kamble A, Jabin Z, Agarwal N, et al. Effectiveness of Oral Probiotics in Reducing S. Mutans Count in Caries-active Children: A Comparison with Chlorhexidine and Herbal Mouth-rinse (Hiora®). Int J Clin Pediatr Dent 2022;15(S-2):S207-S211.

Enhanced proton conductivity in amino acid based self-assembled non-porous hydrogen-bonded organic frameworks.

ß-Alaninium oxalate hemihydrate, glycinium oxalate, and L-leucinium oxalate salt-cocrystals as non-porous self-assembled hydrogen-bonded organic frameworks afforded proton conductivity of 2.43 × 10-2 S cm-1 (60 °C, 95% RH), 3.03 × 10-2 S cm-1 (60 °C, 95% RH), and 1.19 × 10-2 S cm-1 (80 °C, 95% RH), respectively. These materials possess an extensive 3-dimensional network of hydrogen bonds in their crystal structures, making them efficient proton conducting membranes. The reduction in conductivity values over 10-1 S cm-1 order upon exposure of the samples to a D2O atmosphere in extreme conditions ratified the role of humidity for the conduction of protons. This work explores the relationship between structural features and proton conductivity for the design of proton conducting membranes that are easy to synthesize, eco-friendly, and cheap with potential for futuristic applications.

Antimicrobial effectiveness of Nano Silver Fluoride Varnish in reducing Streptococcus mutans in saliva and plaque biofilm when compared with Chlorhexidine and Sodium Fluoride Varnishes.

Background: This in vivo study was done to investigate the antimicrobial effectiveness of Nano Silver fluoride, Sodium fluoride and Chlorhexidine when used as a varnish on Streptococcus mutans (S.mutans) in saliva and plaque biofilm. Material and Methods: 120 caries free subjects, aged 8-10 years were randomly assigned to four different groups (n=30) - group I: Control, group II: Chlorhexidine varnish (CHX), group III: Sodium fluoride varnish (NaF), group IV: Nano Silver fluoride varnish (NSF). Varnish application was done once at baseline. Saliva and plaque samples were collected at baseline (T0), at the end of 1 month (T1) and 3 months (T3) to evaluate S.mutans levels by culture method, optical density and PCR. OHI-S Index was also recorded for clinical evaluation. Results: NSF, CHX and NaF were effective against S.mutans activity. The intragroup comparision of CFU/ml and OD/ml count showed a highly significant reduction from baseline to 3 months for all the 3 varnish groups (p=0.001). PCR result revealed that maximum reduction was seen in NSF and CHX followed by NaF group. Conclusions: NSF reduces S.mutans level in both saliva and plaque biofilm and it is more advantageous than CHX and NaF as it has dual properties of acting as an antibacterial as well as a remineralizing agent. Key words:Chlorhexidine, Nano Silver fluoride, Sodium fluoride, S. mutans, varnish.

A New Family of Similarity Measures for Scoring Confidence of Protein Interactions Using Gene Ontology.

The large-scale protein-protein interaction (PPI) data has the potential to play a significant role in the endeavor of understanding cellular processes. However, the presence of a considerable fraction of false positives is a bottleneck in realizing this potential. There have been continuous efforts to utilize complementary resources for scoring confidence of PPIs in a manner that false positive interactions get a low confidence score. Gene Ontology (GO), a taxonomy of biological terms to represent the properties of gene products and their relations, has been widely used for this purpose. We utilize GO to introduce a new set of specificity measures: Relative Depth Specificity (RDS), Relative Node-based Specificity (RNS), and Relative Edge-based Specificity (RES), leading to a new family of similarity measures. We use these similarity measures to obtain a confidence score for each PPI. We evaluate the new measures using four different benchmarks. We show that all the three measures are quite effective. Notably, RNS and RES more effectively distinguish true PPIs from false positives than the existing alternatives. RES also shows a robust set-discriminating power and can be useful for protein functional clustering as well.

WELPSA: A natural catalyst of alkali and alkaline earth metals for the facile synthesis of tetrahydrobenzo[b]pyrans and pyrano[2,3-d]pyrimidinones as inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2.

Since 2019, the infection of SARS-CoV-2 has been spreading worldwide and caused potentially lethal health problems. In view of this, the present study explores the most commodious and environmentally benign synthetic protocol for the synthesis of tetrahydrobenzo[b]pyran and pyrano[2,3-d]pyrimidinones as SARS-CoV-2 inhibitors via three-component cycloaddition of aromatic aldehyde, malononitrile, and dimedone/barbituric acid in water. Lemon peel from juice factory waste, namely, lemon (Citrus limon), sweet lemon (C. limetta), and Kaffir lime or Citron (C. hystrix), effectually utilized to obtain WELPSA, WESLPSA, and WEKLPSA, respectively, for the synthesis of title compounds. The catalyst was characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDX). The concentration of sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium in the catalyst (WELPSA) was determined using atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS). The current approach manifests numerous notable advantages that include ease of preparation, handling and benignity of the catalyst, low cost, green reaction conditions, facile workup, excellent yields (93%-97%) with extreme purity, and recyclability of the catalyst. Compounds were docked on the crystal structure of SARS-CoV-2 (PDB: 6M3M). The consensus score obtained in the range 2.47-4.63 suggests that docking study was optimistic indicating the summary of all forces of interaction between ligands and the protein.

Comparative Evaluation of Cleaning Capacity and Efficiency of Kedo-S Pediatric Rotary Files, Rotary ProTaper, and Hand K Files in Primary Molar Pulpectomy.

AIM AND OBJECTIVE: To assess and compare the cleaning efficacy and instrumentation time of K files, ProTaper, and Kedo-S rotary files in primary molars. MATERIALS AND METHODS: India ink was injected into 120 root canals of selected primary molars. The root canals were randomly and equally divided into three groups based on instrumentation technique: group I-K files, group II-ProTaper, and group III-Kedo-S. After instrumentation with respective method, the canals were cleared and observed under a stereomicroscope, the instrumentation time for each root canal was also measured with a stopwatch. Statistical analysis was done with one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and post hoc Bonferroni. RESULT: Kedo-S rotary files performed significantly better cleaning of the canals in the coronal and middle third than ProTaper and K files (p = 0.0001). In the apical third, the difference between the two rotary systems was not significant. The time taken for instrumentation was lowest with Kedo-S followed by ProTaper and K files. CONCLUSION: Kedo-S pediatric rotary system showed significantly better cleaning than ProTaper rotary system and K files in cleaning primary molar root canals. CLINICAL RELEVANCE: The anatomy and morphology of primary teeth demand a specialized file system that will overcome the shortcomings of conventional biomechanical preparation. Kedo-S files, being exclusive pediatric rotary files, might prove to be a boon in primary canal preparation. HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Kalita S, Agarwal N, Jabin Z, et al. Comparative Evaluation of Cleaning Capacity and Efficiency of Kedo-S Pediatric Rotary Files, Rotary ProTaper, and Hand K Files in Primary Molar Pulpectomy. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent 2021;14(3):383-387.

SpliceViNCI: Visualizing the splicing of non-canonical introns through recurrent neural networks.

Most of the current computational models for splice junction prediction are based on the identification of canonical splice junctions. However, it is observed that the junctions lacking the consensus dimers GT and AG also undergo splicing. Identification of such splice junctions, called the non-canonical splice junctions, is also essential for a comprehensive understanding of the splicing phenomenon. This work focuses on the identification of non-canonical splice junctions through the application of a bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) network. Furthermore, we apply a back-propagation-based (integrated gradient) and a perturbation-based (occlusion) visualization techniques to extract the non-canonical splicing features learned by the model. The features obtained are validated with the existing knowledge from the literature. Integrated gradient extracts features that comprise contiguous nucleotides, whereas occlusion extracts features that are individual nucleotides distributed across the sequence.

Intra-Articular Corticosteroid Injection After Total Knee Replacement: Is it Safe?

Recalcitrant pain after total knee replacement (TKR) is sometimes treated with intra-articular steroid injections (IASI), with few studies reporting on the risk of subsequent periprosthetic joint infection (PJI). This is a systematic review to evaluate the incidence and risk of PJI after IASI into a total knee replacement. We searched online databases using the keywords "total knee replacement," "total knee arthroplasty," "steroids" and "intra-articular injection." A total of 7386 articles (PubMed - 91, Embase - 70, Web of Science - 57, CINAHL - 8, and Google Scholar - 7160) were retrieved on the initial search. After applying exclusion criteria, four articles were included in this review for evaluation and statistical analysis. There were no level one or two studies. The incidence of infection after IASI at 12 months was 138/6499 or 2.1%, while the incidence of infection rate among controls at 12 months was 158/11256 or 1.4%. A chi-square test showed that the difference in infection rate was significant (p = 0.0002424). A caveat is that simple statistical test results are virtually guaranteed to be statistically significant with large sample size. IASI into a TKR is not a benign procedure and that may be associated with a significantly increased risk of subsequent periprosthetic joint infection. We, therefore, recommend against IASI into a TKR until better studies can be performed to determine their safety and efficacy.

Rapid Reconstruction of Time-varying Gene Regulatory Networks with Limited Main Memory.

Reconstruction of time-varying gene regulatory networks underlying a time-series gene expression data is a fundamental challenge in the computational systems biology. The challenge increases multi-fold if the target networks need to be constructed for hundreds to thousands of genes. There have been constant efforts to design an algorithm that can perform the reconstruction task correctly as well as can scale efficiently (with respect to both time and memory) to such a large number of genes. However, the existing algorithms either do not offer time-efficiency, or they offer it at other costs - memory-inefficiency or imposition of a constraint, known as the 'smoothly time-varying assumption'. In this article, two novel algorithms - 'an algorithm for reconstructing Time-varying Gene regulatory networks with Shortlisted candidate regulators - which is Light on memory' (TGS-Lite) and 'TGS-Lite Plus' (TGS-Lite+) - are proposed that are time-efficient, memory-efficient and do not impose the smoothly time-varying assumption. Additionally, they offer state-of-the-art reconstruction correctness as demonstrated with three benchmark datasets. Source Code: https://github.com/sap01/TGS-Lite-supplem/tree/master/sourcecode.

Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric properties of the Hindi version of Child Perception Questionnaire (CPQ11-14 ) in school children.

BACKGROUND: There is a need to validate OHRQoL measures in Hindi to assess the OHRQoL of Indian children. AIM: To develop a Hindi version of the CPQ11-14 and to appraise its validity and reliability for use among North Indian children aged 11-14 years. DESIGN: The cross-culturally adapted Hindi version of CPQ11-14 was achieved by forward translation, backward translation, committee review, and pretesting. A total of 1000 children were recruited from schools, chosen by two-stage cluster random sampling technique. After completing the self-administered questionnaire CPQ11-14 by the child, oral examination was conducted using decayed/missing/filled teeth (DMFT) index, malocclusion index, and Dean's fluorosis index. Test-retest reliability was checked on 100 participants after one week. RESULTS: The floor effect was present in 3.6% individuals, and there was no ceiling effect. Cronbach's alpha for the overall CPQ11-14 scale was 0.963. Intra-class correlation (ICC) coefficient was 0.952 for the entire scale. Cronbach's alpha value for test-retest was 0.918. There was a non-significant change in domain-level and overall median CPQ11-14 scores with an increase in DMFT scores. For malocclusion and fluorosis, there was a statistically significant increase in overall and domain-level scores with increased severity scores. CPQ11-14 and individual domains significantly correlated with both the global questions. CONCLUSION: Hindi version of CPQ11-14 is a reliable scale to assess OHRQoL in Hindi speaking 11- to 14-year-old children.

Impact of low-confidence interactions on computational identification of protein complexes.

Protein complexes are the cornerstones of most of the biological processes. Identifying protein complexes is crucial in understanding the principles of cellular organization with several important applications, including in disease diagnosis. Several computational techniques have been developed to identify protein complexes from protein-protein interaction (PPI) data (equivalently, from PPI networks). These PPI data have a significant amount of false positives, which is a bottleneck in identifying protein complexes correctly. Gene ontology (GO)-based semantic similarity measures can be used to assign a confidence score to PPIs. Consequently, low-confidence PPIs are highly likely to be false positives. In this paper, we systematically study the impact of low-confidence PPIs on the performance of complex detection methods using GO-based semantic similarity measures. We consider five state-of-the-art complex detection algorithms and nine GO-based similarity measures in the evaluation. We find that each complex detection algorithm significantly improves its performance after the filtration of low-similarity scored PPIs. It is also observed that the percentage improvement and the filtration percentage (of low-confidence PPIs) are highly correlated.

Rapid Reconstruction of Time-Varying Gene Regulatory Networks.

Rapid advancements in high-throughput technologies have resulted in genome-scale time series datasets. Uncovering the temporal sequence of gene regulatory events, in the form of time-varying gene regulatory networks (GRNs), demands computationally fast, accurate, and scalable algorithms. The existing algorithms can be divided into two categories: ones that are time-intensive and hence unscalable; and others that impose structural constraints to become scalable. In this paper, a novel algorithm, namely 'an algorithm for reconstructing Time-varying Gene regulatory networks with Shortlisted candidate regulators' (TGS), is proposed. TGS is time-efficient and does not impose any structural constraints. Moreover, it provides such flexibility and time-efficiency, without losing its accuracy. TGS consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in true positive detection, on three benchmark synthetic datasets. However, TGS does not perform as well in false positive rejection. To mitigate this issue, TGS+ is proposed. TGS+ demonstrates competitive false positive rejection power, while maintaining the superior speed and true positive detection power of TGS. Nevertheless, the main memory requirements of both TGS variants grow exponentially with the number of genes, which they tackle by restricting the maximum number of regulators for each gene. Relaxing this restriction remains a challenge as the actual number of regulators is not known a priori.

Does Sarcopenia Increase the Risk for Fresh Vertebral Fragility Fractures?: A Case-Control Study.

STUDY DESIGN: Case-control study. PURPOSE: Sarcopenia is an age associated condition characterized by decrease in muscle mass, strength, and physical performance. We aimed to investigate whether sarcopenia increased the risk of vertebral fragility fractures among the elderly. OVERVIEW OF LITERATURE: Initial reports on sarcopenia suggest its contribution to the development of vertebral fragility fractures. However, recent studies showed contradictory findings. METHODS: Fifty-one consecutive patients with vertebral fragility fractures and matched controls without fractures were evaluated for sarcopenia, T-score, body mass index, and presence of preexisting vertebral fractures. Sarcopenia was diagnosed as total psoas cross-sectional area (TPA) 2 standard deviations below normative value from normal young adults and decreased handgrip strength (26 kg for men and 18 kg for women). Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed using the fresh fracture occurrence as the dependent variable. RESULTS: Sarcopenia was confirmed in 29.4% and 7.8% of cases and controls (p=0.005), respectively; 56.8% and 13.7% of cases and controls had previous vertebral fractures. Sarcopenia prevalence was greater among those with previous fractures (38% vs. 7.6%; odds ratio, 7.76; p<0.001). TPA was lower among the cases (1,278 mm2 vs. 1,569 mm2 , p=0.001) and those with previous fractures (1,168 mm2 vs. 1,563 mm2 , p<0.001). Handgrip strength was greater among those without previous fractures (19.6 kg vs. 16.3 kg, p=0.05). In multivariate analysis, sarcopenia was not identified as a significant predictor of fresh fractures whereas previous fractures and lower T-score were found to be significant. CONCLUSIONS: Sarcopenia is not an independent risk factor for fresh vertebral fragility fractures in the elderly.

Using the Chou's 5-steps rule to predict splice junctions with interpretable bidirectional long short-term memory networks.

Neural models have been able to obtain state-of-the-art performances on several genome sequence-based prediction tasks. Such models take only nucleotide sequences as input and learn relevant features on their own. However, extracting the interpretable motifs from the model remains a challenge. This work explores various existing visualization techniques in their ability to infer relevant sequence information learnt by a recurrent neural network (RNN) on the task of splice junction identification. The visualization techniques have been modulated to suit the genome sequences as input. The visualizations inspect genomic regions at the level of a single nucleotide as well as a span of consecutive nucleotides. This inspection is performed based on the modification of input sequences (perturbation based) or the embedding space (back-propagation based). We infer features pertaining to both canonical and non-canonical splicing from a single neural model. Results indicate that the visualization techniques produce comparable performances for branchpoint detection. However, in the case of canonical donor and acceptor junction motifs, perturbation based visualizations perform better than back-propagation based visualizations, and vice-versa for non-canonical motifs. The source code of our stand-alone SpliceVisuL tool is available at https://github.com/aaiitggrp/SpliceVisuL.

Management of dental trauma in a child with Xeroderma Pigmentosa.

Xeroderma Pigmentosa is a rare dermatological autosomal recessive disorder that manifests itself early in life as severe sunburn usually after a short exposure to sunlight. The prime characteristic features include photosensitivity, hyperpigmentation and ichthyosis in sun exposed areas, and an increase in the risk of basocellular and squamous cell carcinomas and melanomas of the skin and eyes. The case report highlights the preventive treatment options along with all necessary precautions that should be taken to protect the patient from any iatrogenic inadvertent exposures that may be deleterious to his present state. The purpose of the report is also to discuss the important role of dental professionals when dealing with debilitating medical conditions.

Drug-drug interaction extraction from biomedical texts using long short-term memory network.

The simultaneous administration of multiple drugs increases the probability of interaction among them, as one drug may affect the activities of others. This interaction among drugs may have a positive or negative impact on the therapeutic outcomes. Thus, identification of unknown drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is of significant concern for improving the safety and efficacy of drug consumption. Although multiple DDI resources exist, it is becoming infeasible to maintain these up-to-date manually with the number of biomedical texts growing at a fast pace. Most existing methods model DDI extraction as a classification problem and rely mainly on handcrafted features, and certain features further depend on domain-specific tools. Recently, neural network models using latent features have been demonstrated to yield similar or superior performance compared to existing models. In this study, we present three long short-term memory (LSTM) network models, namely B-LSTM, AB-LSTM, and Joint AB-LSTM. All three models use word and position embedding as latent features; thus, they do not rely on explicit feature engineering. Furthermore, the use of a bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) network allows for extraction of implicit features from an entire sentence. The two models AB-LSTM and Joint AB-LSTM also apply attentive pooling in the Bi-LSTM layer output in order to assign weights to features. Our experimental results on the SemEval-2013 DDI extraction dataset indicate that the Joint AB-LSTM model produces reasonable performance (F-score: 69.39%) even with the simple architecture.

To compare the effectiveness of different mouthrinses on Streptococcus mutans count in caries active children.

INTRODUCTION: Streptococcus mutans is the prime microbe responsible for caries. Mouthwashes represent an effective means for decreasing their count. To ascertain this, three commercially available mouthrinses were evaluated for their antimicrobial activity. MATERIALS AND METHOD: Chlorhexidine, Sodium fluoride and Herbal mouth rinse were evaluated for their efficacy against S. mutans in 60 children aged 6-12 years old. Plain water acted as the control group. RESULTS: The values obtained were subjected to statistical analysis. ANOVA test, student-t test and paired t-test were used for evaluation. Chlorhexidine and fluoride showed statistically significant reduction in S. mutans count as compared to herbal rinse. CONCLUSION: All the mouthrinses used in the present study have shown a definite decline in S. mutans count.