Comparing Oral Health-related Quality of Life (OHIP-14) and Masticatory Efficiency with Complete Denture Treatment

To measure impact of oral health in complete denture wearers and its effects on masticatory efficiency with new complete dentures over the period of three months.

Experimental study design.

Department of Prosthodontics, Bahria University Medical and Dental College, Karachi, Pakistan from September 2019 to December-2019.

Oral health impact profile (OHIP) was used to measure the oral health impact; and chewing gum method was used to measure the masticatory efficiency in this study. All participants were old denture wearers having the experience of at least 3 years and requiring new set of complete dentures. A total of 31 patients were asked to chew the gum from the routine site of mastication for 20 seconds. The weight reduction corresponded to the masticatory efficiency. The OHIP-14 score and masticatory efficiency was recorded at baseline and after three months of complete denture treatment. The data was analysed on SPSS version 23.

The average values of masticatory efficiency were significantly reduced from median (IQR) value 1.20 (1.20-1.30) to 0.90 (0.70-0.90), respectively (p <0.001). There was a moderate positive correlation for physical pain and disability (0.407 and 0.455) at baseline and strong positive correlation (0.771 and 0.825) after 3 months of complete denture treatment with p-value <0.001 on OHIP-14 scale.

Statistically significant improvement was observed in both quality of life and masticatory efficiency after 3 months of treatment with conventional complete dentures. Masticatory efficiency was highly correlated with all subscales of OHIP-14 after treatment. Key Words: Complete denture treatment, Masticatory efficiency, Oral health impact profile-14 (OHIP-14).