Oral health in old age
Today we keep our own teeth or sophisticated fixed tooth replacements high up in ages. A well preserved dentition is both correlated to good oral and general health as well as oral health related quality of life.
We study relations between general and oral health. The health situation in an older individual is very complex, also the care of this patient group with many professions involved, as well as relatives.
A focus area for our research is the cooperation between the health and care sectors and odontology.
Cognitive decline and other functional limitations or variations, often decrease the dental contacts while the medical contacts increase. It is important that the oral health will be lifted also in nondental contacts. We also look at factors that can be an obstacle for dental visits, as dental fear.
Many older people have a high medication usage that causes oral dryness, which in turn increases the risk for dental caries and oral mucosal infections but also the risk to receive aspiration pneumonia.
When older people both lose their ability to perform acceptable oral hygiene and keep up their dental contacts, the oral deterioration often goes fast. The Swedish system of oral care to dependent older people works rather well in special facilities but not for those who still live in their own homes, while domestic dental care is a focus area for our research.
Principal Investigator
- Inger Wårdh, DDS, PhD, Associate Professor
Dental anxiety in adults from the dental personnel’s perspective, a PhD-project
Generally the assessment of a patient’s anxiety level is done by the gut feeling of the dental personnel but it is important that the assessment is accurate to enable a correct treatment of the patient. This is further accentuated when it comes to the older patient, where sight and hearing problems as well as both functional and cognitive variations could be obstacles for mutual conversation and understanding. By tradition or other non-known reasons, dental personnel seldom consider that an older patient’s behavior, lack of cooperation or lost dental contacts may originate from dental anxiety.
The project aims to evaluate dental personnel´s ability to assess dental anxiety, to determine which factors affect the assessment and to translate/validate an exciting international scale for measuring dental anxiety in the clinical setting.
The dissertation is planned to the 9th of May this year.
Group members
Markus Höglund, DDS and PhD-student; Shervin Shahnavaz, psychologist and PhD, Mats Bågesund, DDS and associate professor
Financing
Region Östergötland
Domiciliary professional oral care for dependent older persons, a PhD-project
Older patients with functional variations and care dependency present many obstacles to traditional, clinical dental care. Dental visits may only be actual in emergency cases and prophylactic care will be overlooked. The Swedish dental remuneration from 1999 includes home visits to dependent patients by a dental hygienist to perform an oral health care assessment. Professional oral care can also be conducted with simple equipment in a home environment but county councils or regions have applied restrictions regarding the number of subsidized prophylactic oral care treatments, usually four times during a year. The rationale for this is probably tradition and economy due to absence of scientific evidence. Is this routine effective to handle the progress of common dental diseases as caries and gingival problems or should we implement other activities?
The project aims to evaluate the effect of domiciliary prophylactic professional oral care interventions for care dependent home living older persons, and to establish evidence based recommendations for this patient group.
Group members
Elisabeth Morén, dental hygienist, DDS and PhD-student; Pia Skott, DDS and PhD; Petteri Sjögren, DDS and PhD, Georgios Belibasakis, Professor
Financing
Kamprad Foundation, Region Dalarna and Gävleborg