정신지체 학생의 구강관리 및 구강건강 실태에 관한 연구

Abstract

Recently, our society has put increasing efforts on welfare system for the disabled. Health promotion is definitely important for improving the quality of disabled life, and oral health promotion is also important in terms of maintaining general health. But, oral health of the mentally retarded students is likely to be careless, and getting dental treatment would be more difficult due to disabled itself. Therefore, the evaluation for the status of oral hygiene management and oral health of the mental retardation students is needed in order to obtain the baseline data for the education of the mental retardation students to adequately manage their oral hygiene. Moreover, evaluating the relationship of the dental caries-enhancing bacterial activity and oral health status would be important for the prevention of dental diseases. However, there is limited data on the caries activity test for the mental retardation students and on the relation of the data with the oral health status. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the status of oral hygiene management, oral health, caries inducing bacterial activity of the mental retardation students, and developing motivation method for improving oral hygiene management by clarifying the relationship between caries inducing bacterial activity and oral health status of mental retardation students. Caries experience indices, caries susceptibility test, gingival health evaluation, and oral hygiene management and oral health survey were performed. Through the results of the oral care status for the disabled, we found that they had difficulties to manage their oral health in using tooth brushes. The gingival inflammation was occurred more frequently in older ages. The DMFT indices of observed mental retardation students decreased when comparing the data obtained several years ago, and it was not higher than those of healthy persons. There also was a high positive correlation between caries incidences and the results of caries-inducing bacterial activity test. This result suggested that the Dentocult SM mutans test as a caries activity test is a reliable method for measuring the status of dental caries in mental retardation students. Because it would motivate the mental retardation students to care more actively for their oral hygiene if they learn how much dental caries-inducing bacteria are living in their mouth by observing the bacterial colony on the cultured test strip, it can become a possibly efficient educational tool for the mental retardation students.