Factors influencing oral health status of immigrant women in multi-cultural families

Jong-Hwa Lee*   Mi-Sook Choi1   Young-Ho Jang1   

Department of Dental Laboratory Technology, Suseong College
1Department of Dental Hygiene, Andong Science College

Abstract

Objectives: This paper aimed to contribute to better oral disease prevention and practice of health behavior for immigrant women in multi-cultural families, to define missing and filled permanent teeth index of immigrant women, data from the 6th Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was used. Methods: For the immigrant women to be subjects, they needed to be born overseas, had acquired Korean citizenship as a married immigrant women, and the estimate of the number of subjects was 133,093 women. For analyzing data, SPSS 21statistical program was used. We used covariance analysis (ANCOVA) andgeneral linear models for finding the relation with the missing and filled permanent teeth index. The significance level was 0.05. Results: DMFT-index of immigrant women was 7.33 points. R2 was 0.416; and increased with age, and R2 was 0.126 points higher (p<0.01). In household income, ‘lower’ was 5.933 points lower than ‘upper’ (p<0.05), and in toothbrushing after lunch, ‘yes’ was 3.598 points lower than ‘no’ (p<0.01). In preventive treatment, ‘yes’ was 4.301 points lower than ‘no’ (p<0.05). Conclusions: The result of this paper is as follows: for maintaining oral health of immigrant women, we think that the government needs to develop an oral health policy and a customized education system suited to immigrant women for preventive management of dental disease in immigrant women. In addition, basic data will be provided for public dental health programs based on the result of the study.

Figures & Tables

Table 1. The socio-demographic characteristics of the subjects