Prevalence of Aphthous Stomatitis: A Cross-Sectional Epidemiological Study

Introduction Recurrent aphthous stomatitis (RAS) is a common ulcer of idiopathic etiology but is recurrent, causing painful ulcers in the non-keratinized mucosa. The disease is commonly seen in people aged 10-40 years. The etiology of RAS has yet to be well established, but several risk factors that lead to the development of RAS have been proven in the literature. With an unknown etiology, developing a definitive cure and maintaining disease remission remains challenging. An epidemiological survey will shed some light on the disease's prevalence, which could provide insights into disease management. This study aimed to study the prevalence of aphthous stomatitis among the patients visiting the dental outpatient services of a dental college in South India. The objectives were to discover the different subtypes of aphthous stomatitis and the age predominance of the type of ulcer. Materials and methods The data was collected from the case records of Saveetha Dental College and Hospitals, Chennai, India, dated from June 2019 to June 2023. The age and gender of the patients with RAS were recorded. The details collected were systematically arranged in an Excel sheet (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington, United States) and further analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 24.0 (Released 2016; IBM Corp., Armonk, New York, United States) and chi-square tests were run to check for statistical significance. Results A total of 1,44,056 patients visited the Dental OPD during the study period. Of these, 1115 patients had RAS. When the data was analyzed, there was a three-fold increase in the occurrence of RAS during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which was statistically significant (p=0.043). The most commonly affected age group was 26-40 years. Among the clinical variants of RAS, it was found that 82.5% of RAS patients had a minor variant of aphthous stomatitis. Conclusion This study shows the prevalence of different types of aphthous stomatitis, wherein we noticed that the minor clinical variant was the most common, followed by the major variant. The lesions were more commonly seen in women. However, the age group most commonly affected was 26-40 years.