Abstract
Introduction: Practicing sports places the human body at constant risk of injury. The most vulnerable and less protected body area is the face, thus, a greater risk for orofacial injury exists, being the most common: dental injury [Citation1,Citation2]. Dentistry and sports are usually connected by dental trauma [Citation1]. Sports dentistry is not only the treatment of dental and/or orofacial injuries but also its prevention and the empowerment of athletes to ensure better results [Citation1]. The aim of this study was to access the level of awareness to dental injury in young basketball players.
Materials and methods: A sample of 97 individuals with ages between 12 and 17 from a total of 141 Sport Lisboa e Benfica basketball team’s players were selected. These were evaluated and characterized by: age, sex, dentist visits and basketball specific guidelines from dentists. Informed consent from parents was obtained. Prior to data collecting the Ethics Committee of the Instituto Universitário Egas Moniz approved the study. A descriptive statistical analysis with crosstabs procedures was applied to check frequencies using the SPSS Statistics 20.0 software.
Results: Average age was 13,6 years. 42,3% of the population were women with an average age of 13,6 years and 13,7 for the men. From the players that visit the dentist, 26,8% of the male population and 24,4% of female population received guidelines to their specific sports activity. 3,6% of the male received guidelines but they didn’t visit the dentist.
Discussion and conclusions: There is a high prevalence of orofacial lesions in basketball players and a low awareness and perception of the importance of the use of mouthguards [Citation3]. It is necessary to educate and inform through dentists, both players and coaches, for sports dentistry to be improved. A dentist should be part of the teams to raise awareness about oral injuries and to increase prevention [Citation4]. Only about a quarter of the young basketball players surveyed were instructed by a dentist, suggesting that there is no awareness among the teams of adding a dentist to the medical monitoring of their athletes.
Table 1. Dental visits and Guideline on female basketball player.
Table 2. Dental visits and Guideline on male basketball player.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Sport Lisboa e Benfica for the support in this research.
References
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- Azodo CC, Odai CD, Osazuwa‐Peters N, et al. A survey of orofacial injuries among basketball players. International dental journal. 2011;61(1):43–46. doi:10.1111/j.1875-595X.2011.00009.x
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