Knowledge about caries and erosive tooth wear is confused among Norwegian high school students

Abstract

Objectives

This study investigated differences in high school students’ subjective and objective knowledge- and concerns about preventing caries and/or erosive tooth wear and the associations between these variables.

Materials and methods

A survey was conducted among students at 16 high schools in Norway. The survey included a range of fact-based questions to measure objective knowledge about caries and erosive tooth wear, as well as questions about students’ perceptions of his/her own knowledge (subjective knowledge) and concerns about preventing the two conditions.

Results

There were small differences in subjective knowledge about caries and erosive tooth wear among the 784 students who completed the survey (p < .01). However, students scored significantly higher on objective knowledge about caries (mean 2.99) than about erosive tooth wear (mean 1.45), p < .01, and seemed to confuse the two conditions. By contrast, students scored significantly worse on questions about beverages’ potential to cause caries (mean 5.18) than to cause erosive tooth wear (mean 6.30), p < .001. Finally, objective knowledge about caries was positively associated with subjective knowledge about caries, but corresponding associations could not be found for erosive tooth wear.

Conclusions

Knowledge about caries and erosive tooth wear seemed to be confused among Norwegian high school students.

Keywords:

• Erosive tooth wear
• dental erosion
• caries
• knowledge

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank dental hygienists and dentists from the Public Dental Health Care in Rogaland as well as community nurses who contributed to data collection. In particular, we would like to thank Ann Kristin Bolstad Berge and Linda Naess, who were responsible for organizing the data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Oral Health Centre of Expertise, Rogaland, Norway.