Evaluation of deleterious oral behaviors of IUEM dental students

Abstract

Introduction: Parafunctional habits maybe one of the perpetuating factors to promote a traumatic occlusion causing changes in the masticatory muscles and the TMJ [1]. Thus, they cause an imbalance of the stomatognathic system, creating functional alterations [2]. In RDC / TMD, Axis II, the evaluation of parafunctional habits was limited to sleep bruxism and awake bruxism. Thus, in subsequent studies, other types of oral habits were associated and, in 2004, Ohrbach et al. (2004) presented a list of oral behaviors, Oral Behaviors Checklist (OBC) [3]. This study aimed to analyze the oral behaviors of the students from IUEM dental school.

Materials and methods: This study was submitted and approved by the Ethics Committee of IUEM. The sample consisted of 250 dental students from the five years of the course (50 students per year) aged 18-24 years, who were asked to fill in the informed consent form and the Portuguese Version of the Oral Behavioral Checklist, a questionnaire related to parafunctional habits. Statistical analysis was performed with the support of IBM SPSS Statistics version 24.0 for Windows. This analysis involved measures of descriptive statistics (absolute and relative frequencies) and inferential statistics. The level of significance was p < 0.05.

Results: Eating between meals and yawning, according to OBC, have a prevalence of 96%. Biting the tongue, cheeks or lips and biting nails, pencils or pens have a value of statistical significance with the year of ρ < 0.016; ρ < 0.045, respectively.

Discussion and conclusion: Tongue bite, cheeks or lips and gnawing nails, pencils or pens are related to the year of the course. These results are in agreement with another study [4].

The most prevalent habit in OBC is eating between meals and yawning.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge all the dental students that participated on the study.