We will have the opportunity to talk about OHQoL of institutionalized elderly in front of political decision makers. What should be the main arguments in motivating them to allocate personal and financial resources to oral care (assisted dayly tooth brushing, bed-side dental care etc.)? Has anyone calculated "the cost of OHRQoL"?
Measuring OHRQoL is quite inexpensive, since the questionaires aiming to measure it could be self-applied, still is always recomendable to have some trained personal to response any question from the respondents.
Oral health problems have a cummulative efect thru time, and have a negative impact on appearance, which will have a negative impact on self-steem and can promote depresion.
On the other side, oral health problems will impact on the food selection of persons, which will lead to a malnutrition status and affect negatively the capability to recovery, possible increasing the bed time and perhaps the expenses of each occupied bed, beside the impact on the availability of beds for next patients.
Lacking of oral hygiene could negatively impact on the recovery of the patient promoting the focus of infections in the mouth, that might migrate to lungs via bronchoaspiration, and delay the recovery of each patient; as well as promoting that acute inflammation evolves to chronic inflammation, which will impact on distant organs, which will reduce the capability to recovery.
I hope you find this helpfull.
RC
Thank you very much. It's good help. I am selecting now study results regarding factors influencing the OHRQoL of elderly. I categorized in general factors (socio-economic), type of prosthetic treatments, nutrition and general dseseases as diabetis. I don't know yet how to deal with affectice disordes - including dementia. I tend to consider it a separate group influencing OHRQoL in various ways.
Ina
Not only the infections and other systematic diseases, there are problems like burning mouth syndromes and reduced salivation which all the more can cause many dental and medical problems
Additional clues and common announcements, which may work, as You will talk to the people not being the experts in dentistry:
1) Oral mucous membrane, in particular junctional epithelium, are the easiest way of infection of the human body. That is the reason of why many drugs in form of tablets are administered subligually
2) Apparently oral cavity is the dirtiest cavity in the human body - the biggest variety of microbiota is colonizing it
3) Due to 1) and 2) - if anything goes wrong in the body as general, it will be probably visible somehow in the mouth
4) (Help in realizing the perio-medicine link) the summarized surface of the inflammed periodontium is closing 5000 mm2 - that is the surface of the human palm
I hope it helps, Ina
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