Attitudes towards replacement of teeth among patients at the Institute of Dental Sciences, Belgaum, India.

The purpose of this study was to assess the attitude towards replacement of teeth among patients who reported to the department of prosthodontics in the Institute of Dental Sciences, Belgaum, which is located in the northwestern part of the state of Karnataka in the southern region of India. A fourteen-item, closed-ended questionnaire was completed by 365 volunteer patients who were then examined by a clinician and existing and missing teeth were charted. All the patients who reported to a dental clinic in a period of two months with at least one missing tooth were included in the study. Collected data were statistically analyzed using chi-square test at a significance level of p<0.05. The age of the subjects ranged from sixteen to eighty-four years (mean age 51.06 +/-16.47 years). Among these 365 patients, 228 were in a waiting period for soft tissue healing after extraction of tooth/teeth; 19.7 percent of the patients gave financial constraints as the reason for not replacing teeth; 7.1 percent reported that they lacked the time to have teeth replaced; 6.9 percent had low felt needs; and 3.8 percent indicated they did not know that teeth could be replaced. Subjects with different levels of socioeconomic status reported different reasons for not replacing the teeth and these differences were statistically significant (chi(2)=61.16, P<0.001). Knowledge about the equivalence of artificial teeth with natural teeth (chi(2)=23.01, P<0.05) and problems with artificial teeth (chi(2)=17.25, P<0.05) were also significantly different among subjects from different socioeconomic categories. The findings indicate that awareness needs to be increased regarding the other functions of teeth like esthetics and phonetics because many subjects in this study were only aware of the function of mastication performed by teeth, especially among individuals in the lower socioeconomic group. Attitudes of patients should be taken into consideration to improve patient compliance with and acceptance of prostheses.