Prevalence of Oral Diseases and Oral Hygiene Practices Among Elementary and Junior School Students in Keren, Eritrea

Abstract

Samuel Jirom Welday and Idris Mahmud

Background: Oral disease is one of the most prevalent diseases of childhood in developing countries. However, there is a paucity of epidemiological data on the prevalence and associated factors of oral diseases in Eritrea. The objective of this study was to assess the prevalence of oral diseases and oral hygiene practices among elementary and junior school students in Keren, Eritrea.

Methods: A school based cross sectional study was conducted among 2,502 elementary and junior school students in five selected schools (four urban and one rural) from May to June 2021. A self-developed checklist was used to collect relevant data. To assess oral diseases, two examiners were calibrated by a certified dentist and inter observer agreement was calculated using the Cohen’s Kappa statistic (0.80). All data analysis was done using SPSS version 23.

Results: The prevalence of oral diseases was 88%, without significant difference between males (81%) and females (95.5%). Out of the 2,502 participants included in the study, 1205 (48.2%) were females (Table 1). More than one quarter 935 (37.4%) of the study participants said they didn’t clean their teeth. More than one quarter (30.5%) of the study participants said they cleaned their teeth “once a day” and 16.5% twice daily. The most common tools used were brushes and local “chew sticks” with reported utilization by 50.4% and 49.6% respectively.

Conclusion: Oral disease is a common public health problem among elementary and junior school Eritrean students. These values are considerably higher compared to reports from other, mainly African, developing countries. There was also a gap concerning oral health practices. Only 62.6% of the respondents practiced oral hygiene on a daily basis using different means, with tooth-brush and chew stick being the most commonly tools utilized.

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