Actitudes y comportamientos en salud bucal de estudiantes de odontología de primero a quinto semestre de la Universidad Santo Tomás

Abstract

Introduction: It is of great importance that dentistry students have good attitudes and behaviors in oral health since these in their clinical stage and then throughout their careers will be responsible for transmitting this information to encourage good oral hygiene behaviors and help in the prevention of diseases of the population. Objective: To analyze the attitudes and behaviors related to oral health, according to the HU-DBI, of dentistry students from first to fifth semester of the University of Santo Tomás in the first period of 2019. Methodology: The study was analytical observational cut transversal and all the students of the corresponding semesters were taken, which gave a final number of 225 people, considering that minors were excluded. The questionnaire Hiroshima University-Dental Behavioral Inventory (HU-DBI) was applied and some sociodemographic variables were evaluated. Results: The median score of the HU-DBI questionnaire was 8 points for all students and 69.33% of them obtained a good score. There were no statistically significant differences between semesters and gender, although younger students had a lower score, and a difference between the strata was found to be more favorable for students in stratum 4 because despite the fact that the only person obtained a bad score in the whole study is in this category, the majority obtained a good score (80.49%). Conclusions: Although the hypothesis was not fulfilled that presumed that at higher semester the students would present a higher score, the attitudes and behaviors in oral health of the study population are mostly good and students from I to V semester of USTA dentistry have similar scores on attitudes and behaviors in oral health according to the HU-DBI questionnaire.