Baby Bottle Tooth Decay (BBTD) is a disease of infants that devastates the dentition of ethnic minority populations. In spite of the significant improvements made in the oral health during the past two decades, the decline in dental caries has not been uniform across all populations. In Puerto Rico, dental caries has been identified as an important health problem in children and especially in low socioeconomic groups. The major purpose of this project is to develop a community- based and culturally sensitive intervention to prevent dental disease, specially dental caries among disadvantaged rural Puerto Rican mothers and children. Such an objective is congruent with the new objective in Healthy People 2000 aimed at preventing BBTD and the recommended campaign that enhances parent and caretaker awareness. This project has four major subgoals which will be accomplished over the five years of the project: (1) To use qualitative research methods to develop culturally appropriate community-based interventions and instruments (2) To provide baseline information about the study population and to guide development of community-based interventions (3) To test intervention strategies (4) To assess intervention strategies over time (at 6 and 18 months post-intervention). The project will study 2 communities, one community will receive mother and child community-based interventions; one will be the control community. Four phases will be developed during the 5 years period of the study. The study will recruit the following groups of women: (1) Pregnant women and those with newborns (2) Women with children under 6 months (3) Women with children 6 to 12 months (4) Women with children 12 to 24 months (5) Women with children in preschool (age 3-5) (6) Women with daughters of childbearing age. Phase 1 will generate data collected from 24 focus ,groups interviews with 6-10 mothers in each group regarding childfeeding practices. Phase 2 (years 2 and 3) will implement the community intervention suggested from data collected in Phase 1 and will examine cross-sectional samples of mothers and children of each community in each group at baseline and at 6 and 18 months post-community intervention. The sample size will be 195 mothers, 65 in each group. Phase 3 and 4 will examine cross-sectional sub-samples of mothers and their children to test the effectiveness of the intervention. This research will broaden our view of preventive interventions on Baby Bottle Tooth Decay's community-based prevention programs.
| Lopez Del Valle, Lydia M (2010) Dental and periodontal health and treatment needs in a mother/child rural Puerto Rican population. P R Health Sci J 29:36-9 |
| Lopez del Valle, Lydia M; Riedy, Christine A; Weinstein, Phil (2005) Rural Puerto Rican women's views on children's oral health: a qualitative community-based study. J Dent Child (Chic) 72:61-6 |
