Feeding At Sleep Time (FeAST) Scale: Assessing Risk for Developing Early Childhood Caries in South Indian Toddlers

Purpose: The Feeding At Sleep Time (FeAST) scale was developed and validated to assess sleep time feeding practices for children younger than three years. The purpose of this study was to describe the process of scoring and find an optimum clinical cutoff score for early childhood caries (ECC) using receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis, thereby enabling researchers and clinicians to assess risk for developing ECC. Methods: The FeAST scale was administered to mothers of 527 toddlers, aged 12 to 36 months, attending four outpatient departments. The score was calculated based on subconstructs of combined breast-feeding (CAR) and combined bottle-feeding (CBO), and suitable cutoff points were identified using ROC analysis. Results: The study established a cutoff score greater than 14 for the CAR construct and a cutoff score greater than 11 for the CAD construct of the FeAST scale to determine a child's risk for developing ECC The area under the curve (AUC), which measures the overall performance of a scale, has yielded statistically significant values (P<0.001) with fair (0.707) and good (0.788) performance for the CAR and CAD constructs, respectively. Conclusion: The Feeding at Sleep Time scale, based on receiver operating characteristics analysis, can potentially be used by clinicians and researchers to screen toddlers at risk of developing early childhood caries.