Objective:The aim of the present study was to compare the self-reported oral health knowledge, habits and attitudes of adults in Portugal, Romania and Sweden, each benefitting from a different oral health system. Methods:A cross-sectional study was conducted on 1081 adults in the three countries, using an adapted version of the WHO oral health questionnaire. Results:The mean age of the respondents was 46.85 with 95% CI (45.84, 47.86).Over 85% of the Portuguese and the Swedish, but only 55% of the Romanians, reported having 20 or more teeth left (P < 0.001). Most Swedes visit the dental office regularly, but only 50.5% of the Portuguese and 20.6% of the Romanians do so (P < 0.001). Interdental cleaning aids and fluoridated toothpaste were used the most in Sweden and the least in Romania. Daily consumption of sweets was lowest for Portugal and highest for Romania (P < 0.001), and daily intake of fresh fruits and vegetables was lowest for Sweden (P < 0.001). Conclusions:There is a difference between the three countries regarding oral health, diet, dental attendance and oral health-related quality of life, with Romania being in most need of improvement in these areas. The differences could be explained by the distinct healthcare systems adopted by the countries. K E Y W O R D Sadults' oral health, attitudes, comparative study, habits, oral health related quality of life

Urease is a metalloenzyme that catalyzes the hydrolysis of urea, and its modulation has an important role in both the agricultural and medical industry. Even though numerous molecules have been tested against ureases of different species, their clinical translation has been limited due to chemical and metabolic stability as well as side effects. Therefore, screening new compounds against urease would be of interest in part due to rising concerns regarding antibiotic resistance. In this work, we collected and curated a diverse set of 2640 publicly available small-molecule inhibitors of jack bean urease and developed a classifier using a random forest machine learning method with high predictive performance. In addition, the physicochemical features of compounds were paired with molecular docking and protein–ligand fingerprint analysis to gather insight into the current activity landscape. We observed that the docking score could not differentiate active from inactive compounds within each chemical family, but scores were correlated with compound activity when all compounds were considered. Additionally, a decision tree model was built based on 2D and 3D Morgan fingerprints to mine patterns of the known active-class compounds. The final machine learning model showed good prediction performance against the test set (81% and 77% precision for active and inactive compounds, respectively). Finally, this model was employed, as a proof-of-concept, on an in-house library to predict new hits that were then tested against urease and found to be active. This is, to date, the largest, most diverse dataset of compounds used to develop predictive in silico models. Overall, the results highlight the usefulness of using machine learning classifiers and molecular docking to predict novel urease inhibitors.

The Dental Hygiene Program is a fairly recent addition in the field of the health professions in Portugal. In the past 19 years, the programme has developed community activities alongside with clinical work. This programme provides an education that is responsive, scientific and professional, in a learning environment that is dynamic, student-centred and that encourages collaboration between students and faculty. The community activities play a major role in the curricula of the programme and allow the students to develop skills in working with a wide range of population groups and to attend to their specific needs. Dental hygienists are integrated in health teams and work under the supervision of a physician or a dentist. Among other responsibilities, the following functions are part of the scope of the profession: to participate in health education programmes and sensitise the population to the prevention of dental diseases, to participate in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the public health programmes and to perform clinical treatment for prevention and control of gingivitis, periodontitis, and dental caries. An overview of the activities developed in the year 2002 and future perspectives are presented in this article.