Background: Health behaviors play a major role in the prevention of the most common oral diseases. To investigate\nhealth behaviors related to the potential transmission of oral bacteria from mother to child using novel multiple\ncorrespondence analysis (MCA).\nMethods: Mothers (n = 313) with children under three years attending two municipal child health clinics in Finland\ncompleted a self-administered questionnaire on health knowledge and behaviors such as sharing a spoon with their\nchild, kissing on the lips, and the mothersââ?¬â?¢ tooth brushing, smoking, age, and level of education. We used MCA to\nreveal the relationships between the mothersââ?¬â?¢ behaviors and background factors, along with unconditional, binary,\nmultivariable logistic regression models, odds ratios (OR) and their 95 % confidence intervals (95 %CI).\nResults: Of the mothers, 38 % kissed their child on the lips and 14 % shared a spoon with their child; 11 % believed\nthat oral bacteria cannot be transmitted from mother to child. Two-thirds (68 %) of them reported tooth brushing twice\ndaily, and 80 % were non-smokers. MCA revealed two diverging dimensions of the mothersââ?¬â?¢ behaviors: a ââ?¬Ë?horizontalââ?¬â?¢\none showing clear evidence of relationships between tooth brushing, smoking, age and education, whereas the\nââ?¬Ë?verticalââ?¬â?¢ one revealed the mothersââ?¬â?¢ habits of kissing the child on the lips and sharing a spoon related to each other.\nSpoon sharing was related to the kissing on lips (OR 10.3), a higher level of education (OR 3.1), and, inversely, older age\n(OR 0.1), whereas kissing on lips behavior was inversely related to a higher level of education (OR 0.5).\nConclusion: The study revealed two diverging dimensions of the mothersââ?¬â?¢ health behaviors. More emphasis in health\neducation ought to be put to how to avoid bacterial transmission from caregiver to child during feeding
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