University of Dundee Brushing RemInder 4 Good oral HealTh ( BRIGHT ) trial

Background: Almost one-half of 12–15 year olds living in deprived areas of the UK have dental caries (tooth decay) with few oral health promotion programmes aimed at children of this age. Mobile phone-based interventions such as short messaging service (SMS) interventions have been found effective at changing certain behaviours and improving health outcomes. This protocol describes the BRIGHT Trial, investigating the clinical and costeffectiveness of a behaviour change intervention—classroom-based session (CBS) embedded in the curriculum and a series of SMS delivered to participants twice daily to remind them to brush their teeth, compared to usual curriculum and no SMS—to reduce the prevalence of dental caries in young people from deprived areas. Objectives: To investigate the clinical and cost-effectiveness of a complex intervention to improve the oral health of young people living in deprived areas. Methods/design: This is a school-based, assessor-blinded, two-arm cluster-randomised controlled trial with an internal pilot trial. Overall, the trial will involve approximately 5040 11–13 year olds in 42 schools with a 3-year follow-up. The trial will take place in secondary schools in England, Scotland and Wales. The primary outcome is the presence of carious lesions in permanent teeth at 3 years. Secondary outcomes are: number of carious teeth, frequency of twice-daily toothbrushing, plaque levels, gingivitis, child health-related quality of life and oral healthrelated quality of life. A cost-utility analysis will be conducted. Discussion: The findings of the trial have implications for embedding oral health interventions into school curricula guidance produced by national bodies, including departments for education and dental public health and guideline-development organisations. (Continued on next page) © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. * Correspondence: m.r.robertson@dundee.ac.uk School of Dentistry, University of Dundee, Park Place, Dundee DD6 8EF, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Marshman et al. Trials (2019) 20:452 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13063-019-3538-6