Benish Mehmood, Faisal Jahangir, Muhammad Kaleem, Mehreen Riaz Faisal, Faiza Siddiqa.
A survey on oral health behavior and attitude among dental, physiotherapy and pharmacy students.
Pak Oral Dental J Jan ;37(3):455-8.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the differences in the oral health behaviours and attitudes among physiotherapy, pharmacy and dental students of a teaching institution of Pakistan. A crossectional survey on all undergraduate students in disciplines of dentistry, physiotherapy and pharmacy at Margalla Institute of Health Sciences, Rawalpindi, Pakistan was conducted. Non-prob­ability convenient sampling technique was employed. For assessing the oral health behaviour and attitude, 'Modified Hiroshima University-Dental Behavior Inventory (HU-DBI) questionnaire, (English version)' was used. Results reveal that almost 48% of pharmacy students reported their gums bleed while brushing compared to 29.7% dental students and 30% physiotherapy students (p= 0.029). Furthermore, almost half of the pharmacy students (47.4%) and physiotherapy students (43.6%) agreed to using a child sized toothbrush compared to only 17.6% dental students (p= <0.001). More than half of the pharmacy students (52.6%) agreed to putting off going to visit dentist until when needed as compared to dental students (35.2%) and physiotherapy students (44.5%), p= 0.023. Although the present study provides some preliminary results, it is interesting that similar behaviour and attitude towards oral health was observed in non-dental students as their dental counterparts.

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