Association of age with dental plaque score- A record based analysis

Abstract

Dental plaque is a soft deposit that forms the biofilm adhering to the tooth surface or other hard surface in the oral cavity including removable and fixed restoration. It can either be a supragingival or subgingival plaque. The standard plaque index followed is Silness and Loe’s index (1964). The study is done in order to find a correlation between age and dental plaque score.  To evaluate the association between age and dental plaque score.  The study was conducted in a university set up in a Private Dental College, Chennai. The standard index used in the study is Silness and Loe’s plaque index. The data was collected from the hospital digital database by reviewing and analysing the case sheets of patients who visited the hospital between June 2019 to March 2020. The sample size was 1235.  Tabulation and results were generated using SPSS version 19, chi-square test was performed. The age group 18 to 35 years had 52.3% of good plaque score, 42.6% of fair and 5% of poor plaque score. The age group 36 to 50 years had 40% of good plaque score, 49.9% of fair and 10.1% of poor plaque score.  The age group 51 to 70 years had 32.2% of good 50% of fair and 17.8% of poor plaque score. P value was found to be significant <0.05.  Within the limits of the study, it was observed that the age group 51 to 70 years had notably higher prevalence of fair and poor plaque scores when compared to other two age groups. This study can be used as a reference for understanding the pattern of age wise distribution of dental plaque.