Assessing the effects of oral health knowledge and behaviours of mothers on the oral health of 4-6 years old children

Objective: To determine the knowledge and behaviours of the mothers in order to study its relation to the pre-school children oral health status Method: A questionnaire of 27 questions was prepared using the questionnaires previously used in the assessment of mothers' knowledge and behaviour towards oral health. The questionnaire was designed to measure the mothers' knowledge using 10 questions cumulative score while the behaviour was determined through 17 questions directed to the children mothers. This questionnaire was applied to the mothers of children aged 4-6 years old that applied to the paediatrics polyclinic in Dokuz Eylul University Hospital. Children's oral and dental health was examined by the researcher and scores were calculated using dmft index. Mothers knowledge and experience about pre-school children's dental health was evaluated. In addition, the impact of knowledge and behaviour of the mothers on the dental health of children was also assessed. The oral health knowledge was calculated from the questionnaire. Moreover, the relationship between dmft score and the knowledge level of the mothers was examined. Using SPSS, Chi-Square, t-test and logistic regression tests were used in the statistical analysis. Results: The study population consisted of 261 pre-school children and their mothers. Which included 126 males (48.3%) males and 135 females (51.7%). The percentages of 4, 5- and 6-years old children in the time of data collection who were included in the study ages were 31.4%, 30.7% and 35.2%, respectively. The number of true answers had been calculated and cumulative mothers' oral health knowledge score was counted out of 10. The mean mothers' oral health knowledge score was found to be 4.24  1.94. When the mothers' knowledge was categorised into 3 groups poor, fair and good knowledge it was found 37.5%, 33.0% and 29.5%, respectively. The children oral health examination through dmft scoring system for primary teeth showed that 71.3% of children had experienced dental caries. 47.2% had low caries, 24.1% had high caries and only 28.7 were considered not having obvious caries. the mean value for dmft score was 2.32  2.39. The number of decayed teeth per child was 2.08  2.28, 0.04  0.29 for missing teeth and 0.19  0.76 for filled teeth. Our study showed that the mother's cumulative oral health knowledge score has a statistically significant relationship to the children oral health status. The higher the mother's oral health knowledge scores the better their children oral health status (p=0.001). Conclusion: Mothers oral health and oral health indices in the study population that were included in our study is clearly worse than the developed countries and lagging behind the WHO goal for 2020. These results show that there is an urgent need to improve the effectiveness of preventive care in the oral health programmes in order to lift up the oral health standards of the Turkish children specifically and the Turkish community in general. This research study results also shows us that there is a need for more studies in order to examine the factors that can be titrated, analysed and changed in order to have a caries-free generation. Key Words: preschool children health, Oral health knowledge, dental caries.