A STUDY ON AWARENESS OF ORAL HYGIENE PRACTICES

Background: This study was to determine oral hygiene practices and the occurrence of dental caries among undergraduate students of southwest institution in Nigeria. Methodology: The study adopted a descriptive survey design. The Sample size for this study was two hundred and one (201). Structured questionnaire was used to collect data. Three research questions were answered. Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlations coefficient were used for data analysis. Results: shows that 55.7% of the respondents brush their teeth once a day, 48.3% of the respondents used tooth brush and tooth paste while 40.3% used chewing stick to clean their teeth. Furthermore, 52.2% replace their tooth brush every 6months and 27.9% when it got spoilt. Majority of the respondents (83.1%) did not visit the dentist at all for treatment of infection. Some of the relationships were positively significant while others were negatively significant. The relationships that had positive correlations include the method of tooth brushing with (r =0.163), type of diet (r =0.028), incidence of tooth extraction (r =0.203) and eating of chocolate (r =0.058). Negative relationship occurred in tooth brushing habits and practices (r =-0.139) frequency of tooth brushing and dental caries (r = -0.180), and treatment for oral infection (r =-0.012). Most of the students did not have good tooth brushing habit Conclusions: It was therefore recommended that awareness should be created about the importance of oral hygiene