JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Misleading online content continually propagates possible adverse effects of fluoridated oral care products and water, although their essential role in preventing and controlling dental caries.

Objective:

This study aims to evaluate the patterns of psychophysiological reactions of adults after the consumption of online fluoride-related information and disinformation.

Methods:

A two-armed, single-blinded, parallel, and randomized controlled trial will be conducted with 58 parents or caregivers of children who attend the Clinics of Pediatric Dentistry of the Bauru School of Dentistry, considering an attrition of 10% and a significance level of 5%. The participants will be blocked randomized with randomly selected block sizes to test and intervention groups, being respectively exposed to fluoride-related information or disinformation presented on a computer, with simultaneous monitoring of their psychophysiological reactions, composed by the analysis of heart rate and 7 facial features (mouth outer, mouth corner, eye area, eyebrow activity, face area, face motion, and facial center of mass). Following, participants will respond to questions about the utility and truthfulness of content, their emotional state after the experiment, eHealth Literacy, oral health knowledge, and socioeconomic characteristics. The Shapiro-Wilk and Levene tests will be used to determine the normality and homogeneity of data, which will indicate further statistical analyses for elucidating significant differences between groups, using parametric (Student t-test) or nonparametric (Mann-Whitney U test) analyses. Also, multiple logistic regression models will be developed to evaluate the influence of distinct variables on the psychophysiological aspects. Only factors with significant Wald statistics in the univariate analysis will be included in the multiple models (P<.20). Furthermore, the ROC curve analysis will be performed to determine the accuracy of remote heart rate concerning measured heart rate. For all analyses, P values <.05 will be considered significant.

Results:

At this moment, no volunteer was recruited. From June 2022, parents and caregivers who frequent Clinics of Pediatric Dentistry at the Bauru School of Dentistry will be invited to participate in the study.

Conclusions:

This randomized controlled trial aims to elucidate differences between psychophysiological patterns of adults exposed to true or false oral health information. This evidence may support the development of further studies and digital strategies, such as neural network models to automatically detect misinformation available on the Internet. Clinical Trial: This study was reviewed and approved by the Council on Ethics in Human Research from the Bauru School of Dentistry (CAAE: 53483821.0.0000.5417), registered in the Brazilian Clinical Trials Registry (RBR-7q4ymr2), and assigned with the universal trial number U1111-1263-8227.