Spencer A J
Department of Dentistry, University of Adelaide, Australia.
Community Dent Oral Epidemiol. 1997 Feb;25(1):52-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0528.1997.tb00899.x.
The traditional measure of caries, the DMF index, either as prevalence or incidence of disease, has become highly positively skewed among children and young adults. Most discussion of skewed distributions has focused on the properties of statistical analyses using such data or the implications for sample sizes and subject selection in clinical trials. This paper examines the full range of epidemiologic studies, their aims and constitutive interest in order to identify the measurement problems associated with skewed DMF index data. Constitutive interests include: description; documentation; explanation and prediction; evaluation; advocacy; and, experimentation. 'New' outcome measures that would assist in reaching the aims and constitutive interests of the epidemiology of caries include caries severity grading, variants of prevalence, extent and severity and their combination into case definitions, and weighting of the components of the DMF index. Research questions for each area of 'new' outcome measures are identified as steps in the codifying of their use in the epidemiology of caries.
传统的龋齿衡量指标，即DMF指数，无论是作为疾病患病率还是发病率，在儿童和年轻人中都呈现出高度正偏态分布。大多数关于偏态分布的讨论都集中在使用此类数据进行统计分析的特性，或者临床试验中样本量和受试者选择的影响上。本文研究了流行病学研究的全貌、其目的和构成性兴趣，以便识别与偏态DMF指数数据相关的测量问题。构成性兴趣包括：描述；记录；解释与预测；评估；倡导；以及实验。有助于实现龋齿流行病学目的和构成性兴趣的“新”结局指标包括龋齿严重程度分级、患病率、范围和严重程度的变体及其组合成病例定义，以及DMF指数各组成部分的加权。“新”结局指标各领域的研究问题被确定为其在龋齿流行病学中应用编码的步骤。
