Objectives: There are a few studies addressing the relationship between salivary alpha-amylase and dental caries. This study was implemented in order to investigate the effect of salivary alpha-amylase level on early childhood caries (ECC).Materials and Methods: In this matched case-control study, which was carried out from November 2011 to March 2012 in Hamadan City, the west of Iran, mean levels of salivary alpha-amylase of 84 ECC-active cases were compared to that of 84 ECC-free controls using spectrophotometric method to assay enzyme kinetics. The two groups were matched by oral hygiene (frequency of tooth brushing per day) and food habits (frequency of sugar consumption between servings). Subsequently, a subsample of 28 cases was undergone emergency treatment of dental caries. Alpha amylase level was measured before treatment and 30 to 45 minutes later.Results: The results indicated an inverse relationship between alpha-amylase level and dental caries. The mean level of salivary alpha-amylase was 28.27 and 42.08 kU/L in cases and controls respectively (P=0.001). In addition, emergency treatment of dental caries increased the level of salivary alpha-amylase significantly from 15.05 kU/L before treatment to 23.94 kU/L thereafter (P=0.001) although the level of alpha-amylase did not reach the normal level of ECC-free controlsConclusion: Generally it can be concluded that low levels of alpha-amylase may promote early childhood caries. On the other hand, dental caries may subsequently reduce the level of salivary alpha-amylase. This vicious cycle may promote and then accelerate caries formation among susceptible people with low level of salivary alpha-amylase.

Background Traumatic dental injuries are one of the most important problems with major physical, aesthetic, psychological, social, functional and therapeutic problems that adversely affect the quality of life of children and adolescents. Recently the development of methods based on machine learning algorithms has provided researchers with more powerful tools to more accurate prediction in different domains and evaluate the factors affecting different phenomena more reliably than traditional regression models. This study tries to investigate the performance of random forest (RF) in identifying factors associated with sports-related dental injuries. Also, the accuracy of the RF model for predicting sports-related dental injuries was compared with logistic regression model as traditional competitor. Methods This cross-sectional study was applied to 356 athlete children aged 6 to 13-year-old in Hamadan, Iran. Random forest and logistic regression constructed by using sports-related dental injuries as response variables and age, sex, parent’s education, child’s birth order, type of sports activity, duration of sports activity, awareness regarding the mouthguard, mouthguard use as input. A self-reported questionnaire was used to obtain information. Results Fifty-five (15.4%) subjects had experienced a sports-related dental injury. The mean age of children with sports injuries was significantly higher than children without the experience of injury (p = 0.006). The prevalence of injury was significantly higher in boys (p = 0.008). Children with illiterate mothers are more likely to be injured than children with educated mothers (p = 0.045). Awareness of mouthguard and its use during exercise has a significant effect on reducing the prevalence of injury among users (p < 0.001). Random forest model has a higher prediction accuracy (89.3%) for predicting sports-related dental injuries compared to the logistic regression (84.2%). The results of the relative importance of variables, based on RF showed, mouthguard use, and mouthguard awareness has more contributed importance in dental sport-related injuries’ prediction. Subsequently, the importance of sex and age is in the next position. Conclusions Using predictive models such as RF challenges existing inaccurate predictions due to high complexity and interactions between variables would be minimized. This helps to achieve more accurate identification of factors in sport-related dental injury among the general population of children.

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