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Updated: Sep 2, 2025
Oral Health Assessment by Lay Personnel for Older Adults
Published on: February 2, 2020
Prevalence of dental floss use in deciduous dentition: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Edite Barbeitos Nascimento1, Rita Rodrigues1, Maria Conceição Manso1,2,3
1Faculty of Health Sciences, FP-I3ID, FP-BHS, University Fernando Pessoa, Porto, Portugal.
Objectives:
Adherence to the daily use of dental floss in childhood is recommended by various international health institutions/organizations. This systematic review (PROSPERO number CRD42020205232) aims to evaluate the prevalence of dental floss use in deciduous dentition.
Materials And Methods:
A systematic review was conducted in six databases (B-on, Cochrane Library, PubMed, Scielo, Science Direct and Web of Science) up to December 2020. The CoCoPop mnemonic allowed for obtaining 2333 articles and resulted in the inclusion of 7 observational studies that evaluated the prevalence of dental floss use (primary outcome) in children up to 6 years old. The Joanna Briggs Institute critical appraisal checklist was used to evaluate the risk of bias, showing that most articles presented good quality. Meta-analyses were performed using the proportion of dental floss use (yes or once/day) and the random effects model.
Results:
The meta-analysis showed a prevalence of dental floss use of only 12.60% (95% CI: 7.69%-18.52%) based on studies with high heterogeneity of results (I2 = 94.75%; 95% CI: 91.44%-96.78%). Six of the seven studies showed that more than 70% of children never used dental floss.
Conclusions:
A low prevalence of dental floss use was observed in children up to 6 years old. Given the diversity of evaluating the use of dental floss, different options should be the target of standardization in future studies.
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