RESEARCH ARTICLE
Knowledge About Chronic Orofacial Pain Among General Dentists of Kermanshah, Iran
Fatemeh Rezaei1, Roohollah Sharifi2, *, Hamid R. Shahrezaee3, Hamid R. Mozaffari1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2017Volume: 11
First Page: 221
Last Page: 229
Publisher ID: TODENTJ-11-221
DOI: 10.2174/1874210601711010221
Article History:
Received Date: 16/09/2016Revision Received Date: 27/02/2017
Acceptance Date: 07/03/2017
Electronic publication date: 28/04/2017
Collection year: 2017
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background and Objective:
Diagnosis and treatment of chronic orofacial pain are one of the most challenging issues in dentistry. The purpose of this study was to assess the knowledge of general dentists regarding orofacial pain in Kermanshah, Iran.
Methods:
This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2016 including general dentists of Kermanshah city. A researcher-designed questionnaire was administered to collect demographic data as well as measuring knowledge of the dentists in four sections including etiology, clinical presentations, physical examination, and treatment of chronic orofacial pain. The questionnaire had acceptable validity (content validity > 0.9) and reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient= 0.857 for test re-test; Cronbach’s alpha= 0.72 for internal consistency). The data were analyzed by the SPSS software (ver. 18.0) using Spearman’s correlation coefficient (P < 0.05).
Results:
There were 121 male (72.9%) and 45 female (27.1%) dentists with mean (SD) age of 40.55 (8.03) years and mean (SD) practice history of 13.28 (8.43) years. Mean (SD) knowledge score was 10.54 (2.36) (maximum possible score= 15). 48.2% of dentists had good knowledge in overall. 48.2% about etiology, 45.2% about clinical presentations, 36.1% about physical examination, and 7.8% about treatment had good knowledge. Knowledge had direct and significant relationship with age (r = 0.179; P = 0.022) and practice history (r = 0.18; P = 0.021).
Conclusion:
The results showed that the studied dentists did not have enough knowledge about chronic orofacial pain especially in the treatment field. Therefore, it is recommended to implement educational programs to improve their knowledge.
