A Survey of Oral Hygiene in the Nursery School Children in Kagoshima City, with a Proposal for Dental Health Care

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the oral hygiene of nursery school children and to discuss the role of the nursery school in dental health guidance for children under six years of age. The subjects were 1200 nursery school children attending nursery school in Kagoshima city. The ages were from zero to six years. The frequency of tooth brushing and intake of between-meal snacks were studied with a questionnaire, and we examined the presence of caries, prevalence of malocclusion, presence of abnormal teeth, and the dental plaque score of the subjects, with the following results.
1) The dental check-up by a dentist was not sufficiently enforced at the nursery school.
2) The prevalence of dental caries was high in comparison with Sapporo and the whole country. Particularly, the prevalence was very high at three or four years of age.
3) When the caries prevalence rate was studied by district, the difference among three districts was statistically significant by t test or chi-square test.
4) The status of oral hygiene was considered bad on the basis of the debris index score.
5) Daily dental care for the children was bad both at the nursery school and at home.
6) There was no difference in the prevalence of dental caries when the subjects were classified by the length of time spent at the school.
7) The relationship between the prevalence of dental caries and the frequency of between-meal snacks or a periodic dental check-up was statistically significant.
8) We proposed a method for dental health guidance in nursery school.