Oral Manifestation of Stress Related Disorders among Patients Visiting a Private Dental Hospital - An Institutional Study

Abstract

Introduction: Stress is the most common factor affecting most people. It can be of any form. This shows some of the manifestations in the oral cavity. The oral manifestations include oral lichens planus, recurrent aphthous ulcer, burning mouth sensation and myofascial pain dysfunction.

Objectives: The main aim of this study is to analyse the prevalence of oral manifestation of stress related disorders in general South Indian populations.

Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted in a private dental hospital, chennai. The data were collected from the hospital database. The criteria considered while collecting data were age, gender, habit, and medical history. The collected data were exported to Microsoft Excel and IBM SPSS software and the correlation of the data was achieved through Chi square test.

Results: Patients have a high percentage of lichens planus(48.53%) followed by aphthous ulcer (29.41%),Burning mouth sensation(20.59%) and MPDS(1.47%). The medical history of the patient found that the oral manifestation of stress was the most common in normal patients (73.53%) followed by Diabetes(11.78%), combination of diabetes and hypertension(5.68%), and anemia(5.68%). Recurrent aphthous ulcer has shown to be affected more in 21 to 35 years of age group, burning mouth sensation and lichen planus  has shown to be affected more in 51 to 65 years of age group and Myofascial pain dysfunction has shown to be affected in 36 to 50 year of age group. Chi square test was done, p=0.000045(p<0.05), it is statistically significant.

Conclusions: Oral Lichen planus is shown to be more prevalent than any other oral manifestation and the least encountered is Myofascial pain dysfunction.Within the scope of the present study, it can be concluded that, although the etiology of most oral lesions is not known, the role of stress and other psychogenic factors cannot be ruled out.