Oral hygiene status of dental students as related to their personal and academic profiles

This paper studied the correlation among a number of personal, pre‐dental and dental academic variables and sutdent's own personal oral hygiene. Oral hygiene status of 127 second year dental student was meadured accouding to O'Leary, Drake and Naylor (1972). The overall mean plaque score was 46.7% . Only 18.8 % of the students had excellent and good oral hygiene, while 63% of them had poor and very poororal hygiene. There were negative relationships approaching significance between the plaque score of students and their first year dental grade point avderage and second year dental grade point average. A significant negative correlation was observed between plaque score and test scores in Periodontology I. Students who had a better oral hyginene status tended ot obtain higher grades in periodontology I An analysis of the variance for the mean of each of the eleven variables as classified by oral hygiene status was performed. In general, students with better oral hygiene tended to achieve significantly gigher test scores than those students with less favorable oral hygiene in at least seven of the stated academic variables.