Abstract
Aims were to: (1) investigate the parental difficulties toward their ASD children dental care and, (2) analyze factors influencing their access to such services. Questionnaires were completed by 142 mothers of ASD children. Children aged between 2.5 and 14 years old, with 3.9:1 male to female ratio. 68.3% perceived difficulties in finding dental care. Most barriers were: Cost (75.4%), finding a dentist to treat ASD child (74.6%), and behavior of their ASD child (45.1%). There was no difference among age and “difficulty finding dental care” (p = 0.429). Having medical insurance and previous bad experience showed significant effects on the difficulty in finding dental care (p < 0.05). Children with ASD and their parents encounter various barriers to dental services.
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27 November 2020
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04791-y
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Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank the Research Center and the Deanship of Scientific Research at the College of Dentistry, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for their support to make this research project possible.
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AAA contributed to conception and design; MHA contributed to data acquisition and analysis; MSA contributed to design, data interpretation, and drafted the manuscript. All authors critically revised the manuscript and gave final approval of the work.
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Ethical approval was granted by the Ethical Committee at the Dental Department, Ministry of Health, Riyadh (MOH/DD/2019/83). All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Alshihri, A.A., Al-Askar, M.H. & Aldossary, M.S. Barriers to Professional Dental Care among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 51, 2988–2994 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04759-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04759-y