抄録
The growing recognition that the quality of life (QOL) is an important outcome of dental care has created a need for a range of instruments to measure oral-health-related QOL. However, validated missing tooth specific questionnaires are not currently available to assess the impact of a missing tooth and rehabilitation modalities on oral health related QOL. Therefore, a self-administered, missing tooth specific questionnaire (51 items) was made on the basis of a well-designed QOL questionnaire (Oral Health Impact Profile). Then QOL investigation of 56 patients with this newly-developed questionnaire was conducted to evaluate the validity and reliability of this questionnaire. As a result, test-retest reliability levels of these items (2 weeks apart) were acceptably high (40/44 items by Spearman correlation: 0.42-0.82). The established validity of the questionnaire was also estimated by factorial analysis and seven subscales were identified: 1) physical function, 2) psychological state, 3) mastication and oral pain, 4) pronunciation, 5) swallowing, 6) oral cleaning, 7) aesthetics. Finally, in addition to high internal consistency of the subscales, number of missing tooth was closely related to the total oral condition related scores of this questionnaire. Based on these findings, it can be said that this questionnaire is a reliable and valid measure of the QOL for people with a missing tooth.
