Comparative effectiveness of school-based caries prevention: a prospective cohort study

BMC Oral Health

Table 4 Nonlinear effects for age at examination and trends by exposure group estimated by smoothed terms

	TOCE		Untreated decay (permanent teeth)
Smoothing Terms (GAMs)	edf	p	edf	p
Age at exam	2.94	< .001	3.85	< .001
Visit among unexposed	2.30	< .001	1.00	0.02
Visit among exposed	3.46	< .001	1.12	< .001

Note: increased magnitude of effective degrees of freedom (edf) indicates greater departures from linearity
TOCE total observed caries experience, GAM generalized additive models

ISSN: 1472-6831