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Abstract
The aim of this study was to identify the oral health attitudes and behavior among dental students and analyse the variations in oral health attitudes based on the level of education, United Arab Emirates.
This study included 279 dental students. The Hiroshima University - Dental Behavior Inventory (HU-DBI) was used to assess oral health attitudes and behavior of the participants. Data were tabulated and analyzed by using Chi-square test, and statistical significance was set at P < 0.05.
Students from the higher years had better oral health attitudes, behavior, especially towards gingival health, oral hygiene practice, tooth brushing and visiting the dentist.
In this study the overall knowledge of oral health was good, even though there were deficits in their knowledge in a few areas. The oral health attitudes and behavior of dental students improved with increasing level of education.
Clinical article (J Int Dent Med Res 2013; 6: (2), pp. 84-87)
Keywords: Dental Students; Oral health attitudes and behavior; HU-DBI.
Received date: 14 June 2013 Accept date: 29 July 2013
Introduction
The behavior of oral health providers and their attitudes towards oral health could affect their capacity to deliver oral health and thus might affect the oral health of their patients.1 Dental care providers are supposed to be an example for their patients in order to encourage them to maintain adequate oral health. Through dental student's undergraduate study, it is logical for the students to develop and modify their attitude towards their own oral health2 which helps their patients to lead towards better oral health thus fulfilling the objectives of providing dental education, which is to motivate the patients to adopt good oral hygiene practices.3
Comparing the oral health attitudes and behavior of oral health care providers can be complicated. The Hiroshima University - Dental Behavior Inventory (HU-DBI) was developed by Kawamura et al4 to investigate dental health behavior, attitudes and perceptions. The original questionnaire was written in Japanese. It consists of twenty items mainly associated with the oral health attitude and behavior. All items have a dichotomous responses format (agree/disagree). The HU-DBI has been translated into many languages and this allowed for cross-cultural comparisons.5 The English version of the HU-DBI has good test-retest reliability as well as good translated validity.2,...