Caries Risk Determination of 5-8 Year Old Children and Their Mothers in Muğla Province

Abstract

It was aimed to evaluate dental data obtained after dental examinations of 204 children aged 5-8 years and their mothers who lived in Muğla and applied to Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University Faculty of Dentistry, taking into account their place of residence, mother's education level and working status. To determine caries profile of primary dentition, dmft was used, and for permanent dentition, DMFT was used. They were asked to answer prepared questions. Results, consisting of formed index after intraoral examination and answers to questions, were statistically evaluated using IBM SPSS v23.0 (IBM Corp. 2015, Armonk, NY, US). Normality of variables is examined by Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Due to variables do not follow a normal distribution, differences between index values per demographic variable were tested with Mann-Whitney U-test and Kruskal-Wallis test for independent groups. To make pairwise (multiple) comparison, we used Dunn’s test. Spearman correlation analysis was also applied. According to results obtained, it was observed that mother's education level had a significant effect on children's dmft and DMFT index values (p<0.05). As education level of mothers increased, caries profile of children decreased. A statistically significant positive correlation was found between mother's DMFT index value and child's dmft index value(p<0.05, r=0.017). Additionally, it was statistically determined that dmft index values of children with employed mothers significantly lower than those of children whose mothers unemployed(p<0.05). The study showed that mother's level of being affected by decay, education level, and employment status were effective on the level of children being affected by tooth decay.