Incidence of Periapical Lesions in Patients Visiting a Private Dental Institute - A Dental Hospital Based Retrospective Study

Periapical lesions are caused due to progression of pulpal infection/inflammation to the periapical region. There are many causes of pulp tissue inflammation which includes dental caries, trauma, heat during cavity preparation, galvanic shock and deep restorations. The aim of this study is to assess the incidence of periapical lesions in patients attending a private dental institute. This is a retrospective study. Data was collected as 1000 intraoral periapical radiographs and were reviewed for periapical lesions from the time period of June 2019 to July 2019. The data was entered in Microsoft excel spreadsheet and subsequently transferred to SPSS Version 22 for statistical analysis. Chi square test was done to find the association between different variables. In this study, the incidence of periapical lesions among patients visiting a private dental institute is 100 per 1000 per year or 10%. Within the limits of the study, the incidence of periapical lesions was found to be considerably high among patients visiting the dental institute. Statistically significant association was seen between age and periapical lesions, age and types of periapical lesions and gender and types of periapical lesions (p < 0.05). The association between gender and periapical lesion was not statistically significant (p > 0.05) yet a female predilection was seen. This observation must be given importance and appropriate measures must be taken to curtail the rising incidence of periapical lesions.