3－6歲兒童口腔健康、飲食與潔牙習慣之城鄉差距探討

Abstract

Background: Dental caries of children in Taiwan is the most common oral disease; it can also severely affect children's eating habits, sleep habits and quality of life we surveyed and discuss whether the dental health status of children aged 3-6 years old, especially the rural-urban discrepancy has improved recently or not. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the dental health status, diet and tooth cleaning habits of children aged 3-6 years old and their parents and compare their urban-rural discrepancy. Objectives: 1、To survey the oral health ststus diet and tooth brushing habits and caries prevalence of 3-6 year-old children in urban and rural areas. 2、To study the correlation between dental caries status and socio-demography of children in urban and rural areas. 3、To the study dental caries status , diet habits and the relevance of cleaning teeth of children in urban and rural areas. 4、To explore the important factors of dental caries in urban and rural areas. Material and methods: There were 4152 children aged less than 6 years old selected by the sampling method of Probability Proportional to Size (PPS). The final effective sample was 3,412 children aged between 3-6 years old for this cross-sectional study. The content of the study used an oral examination chart which contained dental health status, oral hygiene status, and a structured questionnaire related to diet, tooth cleaning and feeding which was obtained from the parents of the children who participated in this study. MS Access was used to design the data base. SPSS 17.0 software was used for statistical analysis which contained t-test, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Chi-square test for analyses. Results: The 3-6 year old mean dental health index including dt, ft, deft index, ds, fs defs index and caries rates increased with age significantly (p <0.0001); The deft index of 6 year-old children in rural areas showed 6.60±7.51 which was statistically significantly higher than that of urban areas, 4.54±3.41.The rural children who liked to eat snacks and baked foods showed a higher deft index of 9.87±8.45 than that of urban children, 9.42±8.13 with a statistically significant difference (p <0.0001). The rural children who did not have tooth-brushing habits showed a higher deft index of 5.27 ± 2.88 than that of urban children of 4.95 ± 5.58 with a statistically significant difference (p <0.0001). Conclusion: This survey proved that the discrepancy of dental health status of 3-6 year-old children between urban and rural areas is severe and should be improved urgently. The important affect factors to cause the poor dental health status are age, tooth-brushing behavior, diet habits and the urban rural divide. KEY WORDS： Dental caries experience index, caries prevalence, rural and urban areas, dental health status