Elderly People Living at Home: General Health x Oral Hygiene

Abstract

The Integrated Home Assistance Service (IHAS) was created to provide integral home care for elderly people who are unable to go to the health care units of the Brazilian Navy. A cross-sectional, quantitative, and descriptive study was carried out to evaluate the general health and dental hygiene profile of these patients. The study included elderly people aged 60 years or older who were assisted between February 2017 and December 2022. Most of them were long-lived, with a mean age of 82.52 (±8.66) years, women (63.52%) and totally dependent on performing basic activities of daily living (88.9%). The most common diagnosis among them was dementia syndrome, accounting for 44.3% of cases. Additionally, a large portion of the elderly had associated comorbidities (71.9%), with Systemic Arterial Hypertension (59.2%) and Diabetes Mellitus (28.9%) as the most recurrent conditions. The study found a high prevalence of elderly with unsatisfactory (34.7%) or irregular (57.2%) oral hygiene. Nevertheless, there was no significant association between dental hygiene and comorbidities or the degree of dependence. Therefore, it is imperative that elderly people living at home receive guidance and undergo meticulous and ongoing monitoring, in conjunction with their caregivers to promote improvements in the oral hygiene of these patients.

Keywords

• aged
• elderly health
• health services for the aged
• home care services
• comprehensive health care
• dental care for aged