The correlation between having candies, snacks and carbonated soft drinks, knowledge, understanding and attitude of parents on children dental health care and the dental caries in permanent teeth of primary school students grade 1-3 in Kaokitchakoot hospital area, Chanthaburi province.

Abstract

Aim of this study was to evaluate the correlation between having candies, snacks, carbonated soft drinks, knowledge, understanding and attitude of parents on children dental health care and the cariogenic status of grade 1 to 3 in primary school students living in Kaokitchakoot, Chanthaburi province. The descriptive analytics method and cross sectional interview study on 176 volunteered parents and children were asked using questionnaires about knowledge, understanding and attitude. Dental health status was measured by the decayed, missing and filling of the permanent teeth (DMFT) index. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation and One-way ANOVA test. The results show that 31.8% of sample had dental caries with average DMFT score = 0.62 teeth per person (standard deviation 1.159). The ease of children to access to snack foods, candies and kinds ofsoft drink had straight related to the DMFT score (P-value <0.001). Parents’ knowledge and understanding on children oral health care had no any relation with children’s DMFT score  (P-value <0.05). However, increasing in parent’s oral health attitude affected inversely proportional with their children’s oral health (P-value <0.01). Finally, the study showed the strongly requires constant improvement in oral health attitude of parents to gain a measure of sustainable successfulness of permanent teeth dental caries problem reduction.