Two-year survival of ART restorations placed in elderly patients: A randomised controlled clinical trial

OBJECTIVES: Older dentate adults are a high caries risk group who could potentially benefit from the use of the atraumatic restorative treatment (ART). This study aimed to compare the survival of ART and a conventional restorative technique (CT) using rotary instruments and a resin-modified glass-ionomer for restoring carious lesions as part of a preventive and restorative programme for older adults after 2 years.

METHODS: In this randomised controlled clinical trial, 99 independently living adults (65-90 years) with carious lesions were randomly allocated to receive either ART or conventional restorations. The survival of restorations was assessed by an independent and blinded examiner 6 months, 1 year and 2 years after restoration placement.

RESULTS: Ninety-six (67.6%) and 121 (76.6%) restorations were assessed in the ART and CT groups, respectively, after 2 years. The cumulative restoration survival percentages after 2 years were 85.4% in the ART and 90.9% in the CT group. No statistically significant between group differences were detected (p=0.2050, logistic regression analysis).

CONCLUSIONS: In terms of restoration survival, ART was as effective as a conventional restorative approach to treat older adults after 2 years. This technique could be a useful tool to provide dental care for older adults particularly in the non-clinical setting. (Trial Registration number: ISRCTN 76299321).

CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE: The results of this study show that ART presented survival rates similar to conventional restorations in older adults. ART appears to be a cost-effective way to provide dental care to elderly patients, particularly in out of surgery facilities, such as nursing homes.

Cost-effectiveness of ART restorations in elderly adults: a randomized clinical trial

BACKGROUND: As the world population ages, the requirement for cost-effective methods of treating chronic disease conditions increases. In terms of oral health, there is a rapidly increasing number of dentate elderly with a high burden of maintenance. Population surveys indicate that older individuals are keeping their teeth for longer and are a higher caries risk group. Atraumatic Restorative Treatment (ART) could be suitable for patients in nursing homes or house-bound elderly, but very little research has been done on its use in adults.

OBJECTIVES: To compare the cost-effectiveness of ART and a conventional technique (CT) for restoring carious lesions as part of a preventive and restorative programme for older adults.

METHODS: In this randomized clinical trial, 82 patients with carious lesions were randomly allocated to receive either ART or conventional restorations. Treatment costs were measured based on treatment time, materials and labour. For the ART group, the cost of care provided by a dentist was also compared to the cost of having a hygienist to provide treatment. Effectiveness was measured using percentage of restorations that survived after a year.

RESULTS: Eighty-two patients received 260 restorations, that is, 128 ART and 132 conventional restorations. 91.1% of the restorations were on one surface only. After a year, 252 restorations were assessed in 80 patients. The average cost for ART and conventional restorations was €16.86 and €28.71 respectively; the restoration survival percentages were 91.1% and 97.7%, respectively. This resulted in a cost-effectiveness ratio of 0.18 (ART) and 0.29 (CT). When the cost of a hygienist to provide ART was inserted in the analysis, the resulting ratio was 0.14.

CONCLUSIONS: Atraumatic restorative treatment was found to be a more cost-effective alternative to treat older adults after 1 year, compared to conventional restorations, especially in out of surgery facilities and using alternative workforce such as hygienists. Atraumatic restorative treatment can be a useful tool to provide dental care for frail and fearful individuals who might not access dental treatment routinely.

The Use of ART in Elderly Patients after 2 years

Caries experience is high in the elderly, and barriers to care for older adults include fear and cost. Access to care is especially problematic in the case of frail and homebound elderly. Objective: to compare the survival of restorations placed using Atraumatic Restorative Treatment (ART) and a conventional technique using rotary instruments and a resin-modified glass-ionomer (CT) to treat carious lesions in older patients. Methods: In this randomised clinical trial, 99 independently living adults (65-90 yrs) with carious lesions were recruited from a geriatric day hospital and a community centre and randomly allocated to receive either ART or conventional restorations. They received tailored oral hygiene instructions and scaling and polishing of teeth prior to restoration placement. The survival of restorations was assessed 6, 12 and 24 months after restoration placement by an independent examiner. Results: Ninety-nine patients participated in the trial, 46 males and 53 females, with a mean age of 73.2 (SD: 6.8). In total, 300 restorations were placed, 142 ART in 51 patients and 158 conventional restorations in 48 patients, with an average of 2.8 ART (SD: 1.83) and 3.2 conventional (SD: 2.62) restorations placed per patient. After 2 years, 88 ART and 117 conventional restorations were assessed. The restoration survival percentages were 93.1% and 94%, respectively. Conclusion: ART was found to be as effective as a conventional restorative approach to treat older adults after 2 years and could be a useful tool to provide dental care for older dentate adults.

Northern Ireland, America and the Emerging Church Movement: Exploring the Significance of Peter Rollins andthe Ikon Collective

The Emerging Church Movement (ECM) is a primarily Western religious phenomenon, identifiable by its critical ‘deconstruction’ of ‘modern’ religion. While most prominent in North America, especially the United States, some of the most significant contributors to the ECM ‘conversation’ have been the Belfast-based Ikon Collective and one of its founders, philosopher Peter Rollins. Their rootedness in the unique religious, political and social landscape of Northern Ireland in part explains their position on the ‘margins’ of the ECM, and provides many of the resources for their contributions. Ikon’s development of ‘transformance art’ and its ‘leaderless’ structure raise questions about the institutional viability of the wider ECM. Rollins’ ‘Pyrotheology’ project, grounded in his reading of post-modern philosophy, introduces more radical ideas to the ECM conversation. Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ and ‘marginal’ location provides the ground from which Rollins and Ikon have been able to expose the boundaries of the ECM and raise questions about just how far the ECM may go in its efforts to transform Western Christianity.

Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices

Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.

Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.

The Promise of Peace:Revisiting the Northern Irish Model

The Northern Ireland peace process is often eulogized as a successful model of conflict transformation. Although the process exhibited many of the problems that beset other societies seeking to move from conflict to a negotiated peace (including disagreements over the functioning of institutions and the meanings of cultural symbols, unresolved issues relating to the effects of political violence on victims and survivors and society at large; and the residual presence of violent and political ‘spoiler’ groups), the resilience of political dialogue has proven remarkable.
This collection revisits the promise of ‘a truly historic opportunity for a new beginning’ a decade and a half on from the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The book will bring together academics from across a number of disciplines, including management and organizational behaviour, law, politics, sociology, archaeology and literature.

The different contributions aim to assess what impact it has made in the legal, policy, and institutional areas it specifically targeted: political reform, human rights and equality provision, working through legacies of the past (including police reform, prisoner release and victims' rights) and the building of new relationships within the island of Ireland and between Ireland and Britain. With the emergence of first-time voters who had no direct experience of the violence the book explores what the Agreement offers for future generations.

The book is the culmination of a 12-month research project sponsored by the British Academy and Leverhulme that addressed the following aspects of the peace process:
Peace walls: The euphemistically named peace walls remain one of the most visible reminders of Northern Ireland’s divisions and they are famously the only material manifestations of the conflict that have grown in number and extent since the 1998 Agreement. They were originally placed between antagonistic neighbouring communities – often at their request – at times of heightened tensions. Research under this theme explored the lack of ongoing engagement with their continuing presences, evolving meanings and impact on the communities that reside beside them needs to be overtly addressed.
Cultural division: Cultural differences have often been seen as lying at the heart of the ‘Irish problem’. Despite this, art and artists have increasingly been seen as having the potential to develop new discourses. Research explored the following questions: What role can the arts play in re-imagining the spaces opened up by the promises of the 1998 Agreement? What implication does the confrontation with the legacies of conflict have for artistic practices? What impact do the arts have on constructions of identity, on narratives of history, and on electoral politics?
Institutional transformation: This strand of research explored the significance of the process of organizational change which followed the establishment of the 1998 on political and other public policy institutions such as the police and prison services. It suggested that the experience and lessons learned from such periods of transition have much to contribute to how Northern Ireland begins to address political polarization in other areas of public service infrastructure, chiefly around the sectarian monoliths of education and housing.
Working through the past: ‘Legacy’ issues have gained increasing prominence since 1998: issues to do with public symbolism (particularly relating to the flying of flags and parading), defining victimhood, securing victims’ rights, recovery of the ‘disappeared’, reintegrating ex- prisoners back into society, and the possibilities for truth recovery and reconciliation have all acquired salient and emotive force. Although the 1998 Agreement promised to ‘honour the dead’ through a ‘new beginning’, it is increasingly unclear as to whether an agreed narrative about the past is possible – or even worthwhile pursuing. Research under this theme looked at the complex relationship between memory, commemoration and violence; how commemorative events are performed, organized, policed and represented. It also addressed the fraught issue of how to come to terms with Northern Ireland’s divided and bloodied past.

The editors are in the process of guiding contributors to adapt their papers, which were presented to a series of workshops on the above themes, to the purposes of the book. In particular, the contributors will be guided to focus on the related aims of assessing the extent of change that has occurred and providing an assessment of what remains to be done. To that end, contributors are asked to engage directly with the questions that close the ‘Introduction’, namely: To what extent has the ‘promise’ of the 1998 Agreement been fulfilled? To what extent has the 1998 Agreement given rise to forms of exclusion? To what extent has the 1998 Agreement shaped new forms of debate, dispute and engagement? In the absence of that guidance having been sent out yet, the outlines below are, for the time being, the abstracts of their original papers.

Stress and coping in parents of newly born twins

Objective: Research indicates that parents of twins have poorer psychosocial outcomes than parents of singletons. Parents who have conceived using assisted reproductive technology (ART) have been found to be at higher risk of negative psychosocial outcomes compared to parents who have conceived spontaneously. The current study aimed to model the factors associated with parenting stress of newly-born twins, using the Transactional Model of Stress.

Methods: Data were collected using a cross-sectional survey design with participants identified from delivery records across Northern Ireland. Mothers and fathers (n = 104) of twins aged between 1 and 12 months old returned a questionnaire pack containing the Parenting Stress Index, Impact on the Family Scale-Financial Burden, Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced – Brief Version, Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, General Health Questionnaire and a demographic questionnaire.

Results: There were no differences on psychological outcomes between parents who had conceived via ART and those who conceived spontaneously. Regression analyses found that social interaction and support is an important variable in terms of the psychological outcomes experienced by parents of twins.

Conclusion: Parents of newly-born twins regardless of the mode of conception should be considered an at risk group for parental distress. Support groups such as the Twins and Multiple Births Association could be important in providing that crucial social interaction and support that seems to be important in the emotional well-being of parents of twins.

A internet como meio de criação artística: internet art

Esta investigação pretende explorar a relação entre arte e tecnologia, focando a Internet como meio de criação artística através do exemplo da Internet Art (também denominada arte de Internet ou net art). Desenvolvendo-se através de dois núcleos centrais, que configuram os dois capítulos principais foca, respectivamente, a Internet enquanto meio e espaço de criação artística, e a arte de Internet. A Internet, rede de comunicação global e tecnológica, é apresentada enquanto meio de criação artística a partir de um interesse recorrente pelo desenvolvimento de ambientes e obras virtuais, imersivas, interactivas e ilusórias. A partir deste enquadramento, são apresentadas e analisadas as características deste meio de comunicação, exemplificando através de várias obras de net art a forma como os artistas apropriam estas mesmas características nos seus trabalhos, destacando desta forma a clara relação entre meio e prática artística. A arte de Internet é, por sua vez, apresentada através de um estudo das suas características e das suas particularidades no que respeita a tipologias, temáticas e principais questões no contexto do desenvolvimento de novas possibilidades para a obra, para o artista e para o público. A relação entre a Internet, enquanto meio de comunicação tecnológico, e a arte de Internet, enquanto expressão artística contemporânea, é compreendida através da análise da produção com base nas características que definem a rede. Procura-se, desta forma, destacar a importância da net art no seio da arte contemporânea, promovendo uma nova perspectiva para a compreensão da Internet enquanto meio e espaço de criação artística.

Computing, Design, Art: Reflections on an Innovative Moment in History

The paper is concerned with the role of art and design in the history and philosophy of computing. It offers insights arising from research into a period in the 1960s and 70s, particularly in the UK, when computing became more available to artists and designers, focusing on John Lansdown (1929-1999) and Bruce Archer (1922-2005) in London. Models of computing interacted with conceptualisations of art, design and related creative activities in important ways.

Intimate Ecologies: An exploration of the languages of contemporary exhibitions and making in museums and related cultural spaces in the UK

Intimate Ecologies considers the practice of exhibition-making over the past decade in formal museum and gallery spaces and its relationship to creating a concept of craft in contemporary Britain. Different forms of expression found in traditions of still life painting, film and moving image, poetic text and performance are examined to highlight the complex layers of language at play in exhibitions and within a concept of craft. The thesis presents arguments for understanding the value of embodied material knowledge to aesthetic experience in exhibitions, across a spectrum of human expression. These are supported by reference to exhibition case studies, critical and theoretical works from fields including social anthropology, architecture, art and design history and literary criticism and a range of individual, original works of art. Intimate Ecologies concludes that the museum exhibition, as a creative medium for understanding objects, becomes enriched by close study of material practice, and embodied knowledge that draws on a concept of craft. In turn a concept of craft is refreshed by the makers’ participation in shifting patterns of exhibition-making in cultural spaces that allow the layers of language embedded in complex objects to be experienced from different perspectives. Both art-making and the experience of objects are intimate, and infinitely varied: a vibrant ecology of exhibition-making gives space to this diversity.

Algorithms and architectures for real-time control

Algorithm and Architectures for Real-Time Control Workshop had the objective to investigate the state of the art and to present new research and application results in software and hardware for real-timecontrol, as well as to bring together engeneers and computer scientists who are researchers, developers and practitioners, both from the academic and the industrial world.

Uma escola chamada eu : a exploração da identidade através da expressão plástica

Relatório da prática de ensino supervisionada, Mestrado em Ensino de Artes Visuais, Universidade de Lisboa, 2011

Rhetoric and Realities of London 2012 Olympic Education and Participation ‘Legacies’: Voices from the Core and Periphery

A legacy emphasis was one of the fundamental pillars of the London 2012 Olympic Games. The notion of an Olympic legacy was predicated on assumptions that the event’s value would not purely derive from the sporting spectacle, but rather, from the ‘success’ of enduring effects met out in London and across the country. For physical education students and practitioners, Olympic legacy agendas translated into persistent pressure to increase inspiration, engagement, participation and performance in the subject, sport and physical activity. Responding to this context, and cogniscent of significant disciplinary scholarship, this paper reports initial data from the first phase of a longitudinal study involving Key Stage Three (students aged 11-13) cohorts in two comparable United Kingdom schools: the first an inner-city (core) London school adjacent to the Olympic Park in Stratford, East London (n=150); the second, a (peripheral) school in the Midlands (n=198). The research involved the use of themed questionnaires focusing on self-reported attitudes toward the Olympic Games, and, experiences of physical education, sport and physical activity. Students from both schools demonstrated a wide variety of attitudes toward physical education and sport; yet, minor variances emerged regarding extreme enthusiasm levels. Both cohorts also expressed considerably mixed feelings toward the impending Olympic Games. Strong and variable responses were also reported regarding inspiration levels, ticketing acquisition and engagement levels. Consequently, this investigation can be read within the broader context of legacy debates, and, aligns well with physical educationalists’ on-going discomfort regarding legacy imperatives being enforced upon the discipline and its practitioners. Our work reiterates a shared disciplinary scepticism that while an Olympic Games may temporarily affect young peoples’ affectations for sport (and maybe physical education and physical activity), it may not provide the best, or most appropriate, mechanism for sustained attitudinal and/or social changes en masse.