THE ORAL HEALTH CARE IN PATIENT WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA

Abstract

People with mental disorders and especially those with schizophrenia often cannot perform day to day activities due to worsening of self-care ability, lack of desire for oral health care as well as generally poor awareness of oral health issues in these patients. Also, they associated a lot of side effects of medications and by consequence, all of these may complicate dental management in schizophrenic patients. We realized a study with 50 outpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the oral health of a group of schizophrenic outpatients and to assess the influence of symptomatology on oral health using the DMF-T Index (sum of decayed, missing and filled teeth). Even the results are limited by the small number of participants, we wanted to draw attention to the fact that patients with schizophrenia have important problems related to oral health and there is a very large discrepancy compared to the general population, in terms of frequency and nature of oral care

Keywords

• schizophrenia
• dental care
• oral diseases