HBM for Empowering Parental Toothbrushing and Sugar Intake Control

The University of Hong Kong (HKU)

Status: Unknown

Conditions: Early Childhood Caries; Mobile Phone Use; Health Behavior

Treatments: Behavioral: Standard text message; Behavioral: HBM-based text messages

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04665219

HMRF (Ref: 17181971)

Details and patient eligibility

About

It has been recognized that oral health education for parents is critical for the prevention of early childhood caries (ECC). Few parents practiced caries prevention procedures for their children in daily life, though. Inspired by Health Belief Model (HBM) and using text messaging as a vehicle, a novel intervention scheme will be developed in this study. The objective of the present randomized clinical trial (RCT) is to investigate the effectiveness of the HBM-based behavioral intervention using text message to reduce early childhood caries of children at age 4 through promoting the parental oral health care behaviors (toothbrushing and sugar intake control) for their young children compared to conventional oral health education. This RCT will recruit child-parent dyads in 26-36 child help centers or kindergartens with nursery classes located in Hong Kong. A total of 518-628 dyads will be recruited and randomly allocated into the test or control group with a 1:1 ratio. For parents in the test group, the intervention will consist of a set of HBM-based text messages sent regularly in the following 48 weeks. A standard text message will be sent to the parents in the control group. The primary outcome will be dental caries measured by dmft/dmfs of the children at 4 years old.

By HBM-based intervention via a low-cost text messaging vehicle, it should be able to help the parents establish proper oral health behaviors for their children and safeguard the oral health of children in Hong Kong.

Enrollment: 518 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 30 months old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• young child aged18-30 months
• young children not having any severe medical conditions complicating oral health and dental examination
• parents having a mobile phone with certain Apps to receive the text messages in time (e.g. WhatsApp or WeChat)
• parents who can read Chinese

Exclusion criteria

• families that have been participating in another oral health promotion program

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Double Blind

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518 participants in 2 patient groups

Control group

Active Comparator group

Description:

Only receive a standard message.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Standard text message

Test group

Experimental group

Description:

Receive HBM-based messages.

Treatment:

Behavioral: HBM-based text messages