To Evaluate Self-Reported Oral Health Attitudes, Behavior and to Compare the Oral Health Attitudes Among Students of Different Years of A Dental School in South-India
Seenivasan Madhan Kumar
, Karthigeyan Jeyapalan, Uma Maheswari Mani, Parthasarathy Natarajan, Shanmuganathan Natarajan and V. Anand KumarDepartment of Prosthodontics, Faculty of Dental Sciences, Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute (DU).
Corresponding Author E-mail: madhankumar.s@sriramachandra.edu.in
Abstract: To evaluate self-reported oral health attitudes, behavior and compare the oral health attitudes among a group of dental students of different years in India. Four hundred dental students from first year to internship of the undergraduate dental course of Faculty of Dental Sciences, Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute, Chennai were surveyed and a modified HU-DBI survey was administered to all of them. The questionnaire consists of 28 questions with yes or no responses, where the first 25 questions were related to oral health attitudes and the last three questions dealt with smoking habits of the subjects. The responses were tabulated and statistically analyzed using IBM SPSS software version 19.0. Highly significant results were obtained with respect to oral hygiene in both males and females indicative of good oral hygiene practices. The general trends for answering indicate that both males and female dental students showed a high degree of awareness and competence in all four sub sections of the questionnaire, namely oral health attitude, oral hygiene, self-reported oral health and smoking. This result was highly significant for most questions. Dental hygiene and dental hygiene practices among dental students in this South Indian population show an improvement among dental students from year to year. No significant differences were seen between male and female dental students.
Keywords: Dental students; Dental Awareness; Gingival Bleeding; HU-DBI; Oral-Health Education; Oral Hygiene Back to TOC