Cent Eur J Public Health 2018, 26(4):305-309 | DOI: 10.21101/cejph.a4893

Comparison of oral health in children aged 5-6 years in the Czech Republic and Yemen

Nabil Salah^1,2

¹ Department of Health Promotion and Protection, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

² Faculty of Dentistry, Thamar University, Thamar, Yemen

Objective: Dental caries is the most widespread oral disease in the world, with multifactorial aetiology. It hinders not only the ability to eat good food, but also affects perfect speech and well-being. As the disease is almost completely preventable, and at its early stage well treatable, the prevalence of dental caries expresses the lack of public health literacy and skills in dental hygiene, and availability of adequate dental care. Children are especially vulnerable to dental caries, hence the WHO recommends regular monitoring of children's oral health and also appropriate controls for its continual improvement. We describe the part of the study targeted on dental health of Czech (CR) and Yemeni (YE) school children and its association with basic anthropometric markers of their nutrition.

Methods: Total of 190 children aged 5-6 years (100 from CR and 90 from YE, 111 males, 79 females - 22.5% of the wider study on 5-15 years old children) were involved (after obtaining informed consent from their parents). The sample is not representative. All dental examinations were performed in accordance with the WHO criteria by the same examiner. Each individual tooth, whether primary or permanent, was identified as intact, untreated decayed, extracted or filled. Also, dmft/DMFT indexes for individual children were calculated. Anthropometric measurements were performed by standardized methods and the body mass index (BMI-for-age) was calculated. For the statistical evaluation of differences, the program MedCalc Software Inc., Belgium, was used, especially t-test, Pearson's correlation (rho with 95% confidence interval (CI) and Spearmen's rank correlation coefficient; p-values less than 0.05 were considered significant.

Results: Dental caries prevalence and dmft scores (2.12-4.31) were found to be rather high among this age group of children, with no significant differences in relation to gender and country; only 30.0% or less of children were caries free. The decayed component was the major part of the dmft scores, and the evaluation of restorative index (ri%) indicates a high percentage of untreated caries and a high treatment need. Especially in Yemeni children dental caries is wholly untreated (ri 0.0 %), but also in the CR the dental care is rather poor (ri 38-41%). The levels of association(s) between oral health markers (dmft/DMFT) and BMI were inconsistent (both positive and negative), but without statistical significance.

Conclusions: The high prevalence of poor dental health in these groups of Czech and Yemeni children and low or even no treatment urge effort to include WHO recommendations for practice into the national health policies. Prevention and control of dental caries can be promoted not only by dentists, targeting children and the whole family and their dental habits and lifestyle, with the cooperation of schools, paediatricians, general practitioners and with gynaecologists targeting new and expectant mothers, to increase their knowledge and skills.

Keywords: dental health, children aged 5 years, risk factors, prevention, Czech Republic, Yemen

Received: July 29, 2016; Revised: August 26, 2018; Accepted: August 26, 2018; Published: December 31, 2018  Show citation