Psychological distress and social support are determinants of changing oral health status among an immigrant population from Ethiopia

Abstract

This study presents persuasive evidence that supports the role of psychological distress and social support as determinants of changing oral health levels, among a low socioeconomic, relatively homogenous immigrant minority population.

Is Psychological Stress a Possible Risk Factor for Periodontal Disease? A Systematic Review

“…All of the studies used exclusion criteria and achieved restriction. Nine studies performed stratification of the study sample as follows: Refulio et al [28] (gender and smoking habits); Bakri et al [4] and Forte et al [32](stress exposure); three studies [33,39,41] (age and race; Spalj et al [35] (age and stress exposure); Ishisaka et al [36] (smoking habits and race); and Ng et al [37] (geographic location, high and low emotional copers). Five studies performed matching between the study groups as follows: Mousavijazi et al [38] and Bakri et al [4] matched for gender and smoking habits; Lopez et al [39] matched for age, smoking habits and initial disease extent; Chiou et al [33] performed matching for marital status and smoking habits; and Ishisaka et al [36] matched for oral hygiene and preventive measures.…”

“…Two of the studies were conducted only with women [16,34], and two studies did not mention the gender distribution [29,31]. In most of the studies [4,17,[28][29][30]37,38,[40][41][42], the participants were patients at a university periodontal clinic or private dental practice. Five studies [31,33,35,36,41] were epidemiological surveys involving the residents in a particular area or a randomly selected general population.…”

“…The Visual Analog Scale was used as a measure of stress in a study by Johannsen et al [16], and Spalj et al [35] used a self-reported questionnaire to evaluate war stress. Two studies [37,41] validated and adapted the questionnaire for the study sample. Six studies, in addition to using questionnaires, used salivary cortisol levels as markers to evaluate stress, and two studies evaluated serum cortisol levels.…”

“…Twelve studies were cross-sectional [16,17,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37], three were casecontrol [38][39][40] studies, one was a cohort study [41] and two were prospective clinical trial [4,42] studies, comprising 5051 individuals. Two of the studies were conducted only with women [16,34], and two studies did not mention the gender distribution [29,31].…”

“…In most of the studies [4,17,[28][29][30]37,38,[40][41][42], the participants were patients at a university periodontal clinic or private dental practice. Five studies [31,33,35,36,41] were epidemiological surveys involving the residents in a particular area or a randomly selected general population. The study by Lopez et al [39] was the only study that included students attending high school, which emphasized the relevance of assessing psychosocial stress and its association with periodontitis early in life.…”