The Journal of the American Dental Association
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Visits to emergency departments (EDs) for dental symptoms are on the rise, yet reliance on EDs for dental care is far from ideal. ED toothache visits represent opportunities to improve access to professional dental care. ⋯ Though additional research is needed to better understand why younger adults disproportionately use the ED for toothaches, findings from this study suggest the importance of maintaining access to a dental home from childhood through adolescence and subsequently into early adulthood.
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Clinical practice guidelines represent highly processed evidence with associated recommendations to inform clinical practice and optimize patient care. Appropriately developed, evidence-based recommendations will integrate the best evidence regarding benefits and harms, the certainty of the evidence, patients' values and preferences, and resource utilization. ⋯ The authors provide a structure for clinicians to critically appraise clinical practice guidelines to determine whether the guidelines offer trustworthy recommendations.
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Statistical methods and adverse events (that is, harms) data affect the accuracy of conclusions about the risk-to-benefit ratio of treatments for temporomandibular disorders (TMDs). The authors reviewed the quality of reporting in TMD clinical trials to highlight practices that are in need of improvement. ⋯ This review is designed to alert authors, reviewers, editors, and readers of TMD clinical trials to these issues and improve reporting quality in the future.
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Dental practitioners spend most of their time administering treatments. To ensure that their clinical decisions are informed by the best available evidence, dental practitioners need to be skilled in critically appraising studies addressing therapy issues. Randomized controlled trials offer the optimal study design to inform decisions regarding therapy. The critical appraisal of randomized controlled trials involves assessing the risk of bias, results, and applicability. In this article, the authors present these concepts and provide guidance for this type of appraisal. ⋯ Dentists who wish to inform their clinical decisions regarding therapy and prevention questions can use these guidelines to decide what type of studies to search, define the specific question of interest to search efficiently for these studies, and critically appraise an article about therapy or prevention.