The influence of socio-demographic (age, sex, and area of residence), socio-economic factors (level of education and income), and behavioral risk factors (smoking and tooth brushing) on the oral health was investigated in this survey.
Although there is a great effort to improve general health in Egypt, oral health problems do not receive the required attention. Data on oral health status among different urban and rural populations is lacking. Educating people about the importance of oral health, risk factors of oral diseases, and addressing these issues within the care programs are considered a key to control and/or to prevent incidence of the oral diseases, especially caries and periodontitis and thereby aiming to improve oral health status in a developing country like Egypt.
In the present survey, Desia village was chosen as it is nearly deprived of primary dental health care services. The outcomes of the present survey obviously demonstrated that age, sex, and rural residence have greatly impacted the oral health status among the surveyed sample. Poor oral health status was a common finding with a positive correlation between oral health status and age. Such results are in agreement with a previous study that reported poor oral health is more common among elderly, where compromised general health is usually accompanied by deteriorated oral health status (Gil-Montoya et al. 2015).
In the present survey, the majority of the examined individuals were females (78.7%) which could be considered a limiting factor that might influence the results of this study. The free dental services offered by NRC could possibly encourage more female patients from the village to seek treatment especially that almost all of them have no income compared to males. However, poor oral status was found among both sexes. This outcome is in contrary to Wiener et al. (2012) who found that women had significantly better oral hygiene practices compared to men. They attributed this finding to that women were more concerned about appearance and health.
Regarding the educational levels, the results showed that nearly half of individuals completed their secondary/diploma education and slightly more than one third were illiterate and less than 5% finished their college education. As a higher level of education was achieved, the oral health status was slightly improved in the present study. This outcome is in harmony with previous studies that reported better oral health status was found among individuals who achieved higher educational levels. They also found that a higher level of education was associated with better income, knowledge about oral diseases, and their preventive measures as well as the ability to obtain dental care services (Schluter et al. 2015; CDC n.d.; Gomes et al. 2015).
In this survey, the majority of individuals had no income with females constituting 98% of them. Only less than one-fifth of the surveyed sample had fixed income while less than 10% had no fixed income. A similar outcome was found by Trohel et al. (2016) who revealed that the need for dental care is higher among adults with low socio-economic where financial deficiency was the main reason for not seeking dental treatment.
Among the most important socio-behavioral risk factors that could affect the oral health status are smoking and oral hygiene procedures specifically toothbrushing (Torkzaban et al. 2013; Han and Park 2017).
Smoking has been associated with gingivitis, calculus, and periodontitis. In the present survey, the majority were non-smokers approaching 90% while only 10% were male smokers. Unexpectedly, poor oral health was the present finding among the vast majority of non-smokers. Such a result demonstrated that although smoking is an important risk factor, it is not the main influencing factor in this survey (Torkzaban et al. 2013; Han and Park 2017).
Tooth brushing is a main oral-care procedure to maintain good oral health. Tooth brushing twice a day has become an ordinary behavior in countries like America and Australia (Kumar et al. 2016). In the current survey, only 34.3% of the surveyed sample claimed to brush their teeth. However, poor oral health status was found among the majority of individuals who claimed to brush their teeth and who actually did not. Similar findings were reported by Su et al. (2016). They confirmed that improper oral hygiene measures were associated with oral diseases such as caries and periodontal disease.
The occurrence of edentulism provides information about oral health status and dental health system providers (Thomson 2012). In the present survey, tooth loss occurred nearly in half of the sample with the highest proportion for partial edentulism, where Kennedy class III was the most occurring type of partial edentulism encountered. This finding could be attributed to the absence of oral hygiene practices and consequently poor oral health status, low socio-economic status, and a lack of accessible and affordable dental treatment instead of teeth extraction (Medina-Solís et al. 2014; Olofsson et al. 2017). Furthermore, Muneeb (2013) and Jeyapalan and Krishnan (2015)) attributed tooth loss to lack of awareness and inadequate dental care services.
