Prevalence of root caries among elders living in residential homes of Bengaluru city, India

Abstract

BackgroundAmong the various oral ailments which have been observed in elderly, root caries is a significant one. Tooth loss is chief oral health-related negative variable to the quality of life in elderly and root caries is the major cause of tooth loss in them. It has been reported about a third of older population bears most of the root caries burden, so the present study aimed to assess the prevalence of root caries among older individuals residing in residential homes of Bengaluru city India.Material and MethodsElderly individuals aged 60 and above, residing in residential homes of Bangalore city, were included in the study. The study participants filled a questionnaire regarding their demographic details and oral health habits. Root surface caries was recorded according to criteria described by Banting et al. and root caries was expressed in terms of the root caries index (RCI). The statistical analysis was performed using descriptive statistics and chi-square test. P < 0.05 was considered as statistically significant.ResultsThe prevalence of root caries was 46.4%. The root caries index was 15%. Statistically significant differences (P < 0.05) observed across gender, marital status, diet, socio-economic status, medication, method of cleaning and frequency of cleaning and were identified as significant predictors of root caries.Conclusions The prevalence of root caries among institutionalized older people was high. Oral health policies and preventive measures are needed focusing on the special needs of this neglected and socioeconomically deprived population to improve their quality of life. Key words:Elders, residential home, root caries.

A Systematic Review on Caries Status of Older Adults

“…The included studies reported caries prevalence or experience of older adults at the age of 60 or above in 20 countries from six continents (Table 1). Most of them were conducted in Asia (n = 20, China [11][12][13][14][15][16], India [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], Singapore [25], Turkey [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] and Vietnam [29,30]) and Europe (n = 10, Finland [31], Germany [32,33], Ireland [34], Kosovo [35], Norway [36], Poland [37,38], Portugal [39] and Romania [40]). There were three studies conducted in North America (Mexico [41,42] and USA [43]), one in South America (Brazil [44]), two in Oceania (Australia [45,46]) and three in Africa (...…”

“…Most of the studies (28/39) were conducted on community dwellers in community setting. The rest were carried out in residential homes or day centres (10 studies [13,14,16,17,19,20,30,39,41,42]). One study was hospital-based [25].…”

“…Among the 39 included studies, 33 of them reported untreated caries status, whereas 11 of them reported root caries status. For caries diagnostic criteria, majority of the included studies (33/39) used the WHO criteria, one study each used ICDAS [16], Banting [17] and Barmes [33] criteria and a 5-grade scale [36], while two studies [40,43] did not specify how caries was diagnosed. * Study conducted in institutionalised older adults.…”

“…Among the included studies, eight studies investigated the association between plaque control and caries. Six studies revealed that reduced toothbrushing frequency to once per day [11,17,36], twice per week [44] or no toothbrushing at all [39,47] increased the risk. A systematic review found similar results that people who brushed their teeth infrequently were at higher risk for incidence of new caries than those who brushed frequently [58].…”

“…Three of the included studies found that older adults who did not pay an annual dental visit had increased risk of having caries [12,36,46]. Although four studies claimed that dietary habits affected caries risk, they were looking at different types of diet that we cannot easily draw a conclusion from [12,17,36,47]. Behavioural and socioeconomic risk factors should be included in the investigation in epidemiological studies on caries status of older adults in the future.…”