高齢者歯科のこれから

Abstract

It has been well recognized that geriatric dentistry will become more important in the 21st century because of the increase of the elderly population and their longevity of life. Geriatric dentistry should tackle prevention, medication, and welfare as one. The main theme of prevention is health promotion to obtain high quality of life by maintaining their own teeth and occlusion. The purpose of medication is to enhance the quality of life by repairing masticatory function and esthetics. Moreover, dentists should take part in the care for the elderly with complex medical conditions through oral health care and rehabilitation of eating. Technology assessment is one of the most useful ways to examine the quality of medicine and quality of life. In this paper, technology assessment has been performed to evaluate complete denture treatment using our original scores. The subjects were classified into two groups, one group of 28 persons (12males, 16 females, mean age 71.5 years) who were treated by complete denture treatment at the university hospital and another group of 30 (13 males, 17 females, mean age 72.3 years) who were treated by complete denture treatment at private offices in Kure City. The complete denture score was obtained by examination of quality of medicine, the chewing function and satisfaction scores of complete denture prosthesis defined treatment outcome, and the QOL score was used to identify their own quality of life. As a result, complete denture score in the group at the university hospital was significantly higher than that in the other group. Significant relationship was detected between the complete denture and satisfaction scores (p<0.01). The complete denture score was closely related to the QOL score. Under limited conditions of this study, it could be concluded that high quality of complete denture treatment enhances the edentulous patient's quality of life.