| Abstract: | Introduction and Purpose: Oral care for residents of long-term care facilities is a major challenge. Oral disease treatment constitutes a substantial portion of elderly care, but is often neglected, leading to delayed treatment, thereby leading to additional physical illnesses, and increased medical expenses. Because of the severity of these oral health problems, the World Health Organization has indicated that oral diseases are a critical problem in public health, greatly affecting individuals and society and reducing quality of life. The optimal method for maintaining strong oral function is to establish correct oral health behaviors. In addition, elderly people often have dental defects, poor mastication, and reduced coordination when swallowing, which affect normal eating and frequently lead to malnutrition. Therefore, in this study, we investigated oral health in long-term care facilities to facilitate improving the oral health of residents.
Method: A cross-sectional, interviewing questionnaire was administered in long-term care facilities in Taichung City and Changhua County. The questionnaire content was comprised of demographic variables, the Taiwanese short form of the Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP-7T), and a self-perceived chewing ability scale. We derived descriptive and analytical statistics after converting the data into ridits.
Results: 553 valid questionnaires were returned, yielding a response rate of 97.8%. The results indicated some items significantly affected the self-perceived chewing ability scores, such as ‘age’, “education level’, and ‘BMI’ that belonged to demographics; and the ‘frequency of tooth-brushing’ and the ‘using toothpick or floss’ that belonged to oral health status. And some item of OHIP-7T also significantly influenced self-perceived chewing ability scores.
Conclusion and Recommendations: We found that tooth pain led to difficulties with occlusion and chewing food and it also ultimately influenced the sense of taste and severely affected appetite, which influenced the body mass index. These results show that oral health behavior is correlated with oral health-related quality of life. Efforts offering elderly people oral health education outreach and regularly scheduled dental visits should be strengthened, thus enabling them to retain strong chewing ability and inculcating them with oral health concepts that focus on retaining teeth to maintain excellent oral health. |
