Oral Health Status and Self Reported Oral Hygienic Practices among School Children

Background of the study: Many health problems of the mouth, such as oral thrush, trench mouth, bad breath and others are considered as effect of poor dental hygiene. Most of these dental and mouth problems may be avoided just by maintaining good oral hygiene. Objectives of the

study: To assess the oral health status and self-reported oral hygienic practices among school children to find the correlation and association between oral health status and self-reported oral hygienic practices

Material and methods: The research design adopted for the study was descriptive co-relation research design. The study was conducted in selected schools at Mangaluru. The samples comprised of 100 school children studying in 5^th to 7^th standard who were selected using convenient sampling technique. Demographic proforma, oral health assessment tools and self reported oral hygienic checklist were used to collect the data. Descriptive and inferential statistics were adopted to analyze the data.

Result: The study revealed that majority [45%] of the samples had unhealthy oral health status, [41%] had observed changes in the oral cavity and [14%] of the samples belongs to healthy category. The self reported oral hygienic practices among samples were [47%] of the sample having poor oral hygienic practice, [42%] of the samples having satisfactory oral hygienic practice and [11%] of the samples had good oral hygienic practices. Conclusion: From the present study, it was found that majority of the school children were suffering from dental problems such as dental caries, gum diseases and dental pain .Hence these students were referred to Yenepoya Dental College Hospital for the further management.