Study on Aged Men's Utilization Status and Satisfaction of Removable Dentures

Purpose: It is to survey old men's utilization status of dental clinic and temporary-binding dentures and then to provide basic data to make a program for manufacturing old men's dentures and their teeth health education. Methods: Random selection was made on old men living in Daejeon and Chungnam, and a survey was conducted from April 15 to May 20, 2011. 500 questionnaires were distributed and 420 questionnaires were collected. Using spss 18.0 program, final analysis was made on 363 questionnaires except for 57 questionnaires which had missing value or showed some doubts about the unreliability. Results: 1. With respect to number of natural teeth as per the age, the upper/lower jaws had meaningful differences (P<.001), which means that the older the person is, the smaller number of natural teeth is. In the meantime, there was no meaningful difference according to sex. 2. With respect to kind of prosthetics installed in a mouth as per the age, there was meaningful difference in the upper jaws (P<.05) but there was no meaningful difference in the lower jaws. It was found out that the older the persons are, the more they use removable dentures while the younger the persons are, the more they use fixed partial dentures. 3. With respect to mouth health condition recognized by oneself, it showed bad (44.4%) and good (10.3%),which means recognition as bad is greater, and the age when prosthetics were first used is dispersed variously from below 40 to over 70. 4. Dental care institutions which they mainly used are hospital and clinics (91.5%), and 66.4% of them visited dental clinics lately. Preferential treatment if they go to dentists is as follows in the order of prosthetics (33.9%), gum treatment (24.2%) and pain treatment (14.9%). 5. 68.4% of them revisited dentists after installation of dentures and the reason for revisit is as follows in the order of poorly fitted dentures (35.1%), painful gum 25.9%, regular check-up 25.4% and difficult chewing 9.6%. Conclusion: As our country enters into an aging society, mouth health problem of old men has come to a serious issue, and therefore, a survey was conducted on some old men with respect to their utilization status of dental clinic and removable dentures in order to provide basic data for improvement of quality of their life, maintenance and enhancement of their mouth health. The study result shows that the older they are, the higher the loss rate of teeth as well as needs for prosthetics are, and thus it is thought the study will help to develop mouth health education program which may improve quality of old men's life by recovery of mouth functions declined due to loss of teeth and by regular check-up, education for mouth health control and following-up control of dentures.

일부 노인들의 가철성 틀니 사용 실태 및 만족도 조사