Biomedical subjects

T Laaksonen

Publications and source records attributed to T Laaksonen.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1990

Coverage of public oral health services for young children in Finland.

In the Finnish programme of public oral health care for preschool children, every child is eligible for free care. The coverage of the programme has been high, about 85%. The aim of this study was to determine, whether the nonparticipants of the programme actually do have equality in making the choice to participate. The barriers to care were identified. All 4- to 6-year-old children who were registered administratively as nonparticipants in oral health care in 1981 and their randomly selected controls were studied in the city of Lahti. Detailed analysis of nonparticipation showed that some children had been misclassified as nonparticipants in the administrative statistics, indicating the national coverage of the programme to be higher than reported. Based on this finding, suggestions are made for increasing reliability of official statistics. Multiple logistic regression analysis for 36 factors resulted in three main barriers to utilization. Children of single-parent families in which the parent had a low level of education and difficulties to take time off work had the highest risk of nonutilization and thus had little choice to participate. Children with fear to dental care, regardless of any characteristic of the family or parents, were at increased risk of nonparticipation. Not having received the invitation to an examination also increased nonutilization, regardless of any factors related to family, parents or child. It was concluded, however, that these barriers to utilization could be manipulated by the system of public oral health care.

Attitude↗

PubMed1989

Continuous noise, intermittent noise, and annoyance.

In a within-subjects design, 18 subjects listened to white noise, the intensity of which was controlled by themselves. They were instructed to choose the intensity they experienced as "clearly annoying." Three kinds of white noise were used: continuous, intermittent regular, and intermittent irregular. In the two intermittent conditions, the proportion of time with the noise on was 50%. The duration of on- and off-periods in the regular condition was 1.15 sec.; in the irregular condition, it varied between 0.25 and 1.65 sec. The subjects chose their "clearly annoying" level three times for each noise type. The results showed that the mean level chosen was 83.9 dB for continuous, 90 dB for intermittent regular, and 89.6 dB for intermittent irregular noise. Pairwise comparisons indicated a significant difference between continuous noise and each of the two intermittent noises while there was no difference between the two intermittent noises. The results are interpreted as indicating that noise-induced annoyance may be a function of the over-all amount of noise rather than the mere presence or absence of intermittency, at least when no concurrent demanding task is performed and when the required annoyance level is set by the subjects themselves. The results further showed that the intensity chosen by the subjects correlated negatively with scores from Weinstein's Noise Sensitivity Scale while the intensity chosen was unrelated to extraversion or neuroticism scores as measured by Eysenck Personality Inventory.

Adult↗

PubMed1988

Use of children's oral health services in Finland with special reference to heavy consumption.

The consumption of oral health services among 4-16-yr-old children in Finland is described, including an analysis of heavy consumption. Data representative of all Finnish children were collected for 4518 children from municipal health centers and homes. The response rate was 85%. Children with orthodontic visits during the year were excluded from the analyses. Of the preschoolchildren 12% and of the school-age children 4% did not use any oral health services during the studied year. Non-users did not differ from the others in terms of socioeconomic status, distance to a health center or type of residential area. Public oral health services were used very unevenly. Half of the children consumed only one-fifth of the services and the next one-third used about one-third of the services. The heavy consumers, about one-fifth of the total, used as much as half of all the services. Among preschoolchildren, the heavy consumers were mainly from lower socioeconomic groups. In contrast, no clear predictive factors were found for heavy consumption among the schoolchildren. Heavy consumers had more both treated and untreated caries than the other children did. Their treatment was mainly restorative; at least half of them did not receive adequate preventive care. Finnish public oral health care clearly should make more efforts to ensure that heavy consumers of dental services do not remain so.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1988

A repetitive reasoning task based on simple spatial relations.

This note describes a task that requires simple reasoning and can be used, e.g., in research on noise. The task includes a series of items of approximately equal difficulty. Each item consists of five geometric figures and a sentence that claims to describe spatial relations between the figures. The subject must decide whether the description is true. The task is short (3 1/2 min.) but can be extended at will.

Arousal↗