THE USAGE OF TOOTH PASTE IN DECREASING PLAQUE SCORE IN ELEMENTARY STUDENTS MASSAL TOOTH BRUSHING

Elementary school students are the high risk community on caries. Their ages are the golden age on practicing their motoric skills in tooth brushing which is the primary prevention of caries. Toothpaste is paste or gel using for tooth brushing to clean food debris on teeth. This study wanted to know the effect of toothpaste in decreasing plaque score. This study was quasi experiment with cross sectional aproach, pretest-posttest design with control group. The samples, taken from SD IT Salsabila 3 Banguntapan, Bantul, Yogyakarta on April 2014, were 30 samples with inclusion criteria : registered on class 3 and 4, no caries, willing to be respondents and cooperative, presented on the day of research. The measurment of plaque score was PHP-M (Personal Higiene Performance-Modified) technique. The data were analyzed with Wilcoxon test. The result showed that plaque score decreased from 2.63 to 1.00 after toothbrushing with toothpaste group and on the group of toothbrushing without tooth paste, it decreased from 2.60 to 1.20 (p value : 0.000). It concluded that there was significant effect on decreasing plaque score by using toothpaste on massal toothbrushing activity