A cross-sectional study on oral health status of young adults in Turkish population

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to bring out the oral health status and awareness of young adult population living in different regions of Anatolia. Army recruits aged 19 to 25 years were sampled and a 7 items questionnaire (3 of them was Health Insurence Study (HIS) questions) not including private questions such as name, address, etc; were presented to 2320 randomly selected recruits to bring out the prevalence and incidence of tooth loss, awareness of missing teeth, oral health and its effect on life quality, frequency of dental visits and the reasons of non-regular visits of young adult population in Turkey. For all education group and geographical region, 57.8% volunteers had no missing teeth and in the remainder had at least one missing teeth. Only 2.3% of the volunteers go to a dentist office for control (regularly). 35% of them was disregardful of their oral health and 24.2% of them answered “I don’t know that I should go regularly”. While college graduate population had 7 median value, primary school and secondary school graduates had median score of 8. There was statistically significant difference between them (p<0.05). Increasing pain complaints ensure the reduction of index score. The results illustrated, further investigations should be performed on oral health status of the young population and the effect of oral health status on an individual’s life quality is not well known by Turkish young population. J. Exp. Clin. Med., 2014; 31:165-170