Agreement between clinical and histopathological diagnoses of oral lesions diagnosed in clinic university

BACKGROUND: The diagnosis of wide variety of lesions occurring in the oral cavity is critical to the practice of dentistry. It is common for dentists to find oral lesions of doubtful diagnosis. In these situations, the dentist should consider the indication of biopsy as a complement or even conclusive final diagnosis of these oral lesions. The evaluation of the agreement between the clinical and histopathological diagnosis of oral lesions allows the accuracy and ability analysis of the professional or his/her dentistry academic level to perform clinical diagnosis correctly OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to evaluate the correlation between clinical and histopathological diagnosis of oral lesions diagnosed in a university dental clinic. METHOD: This is an analytical, retrospective study conducted with patients biopsied and who had pathologic reports issued between February 2010 and July 2012. The SPSS 17.0 for Windows was used for data analysis. We conducted descriptive analyzes of the data. The concordance between the diagnoses was also measured using kappa statistics. RESULT: It was obtained through a sample of 125 patients. The average age was 48.64 years, with a majority of women (58.4%). The histopathological diagnoses were the most prevalent non-neoplastic proliferative processes (36.6%). The concordance between the clinical and histopathological diagnosis occurred in most patients (87.8 %). The kappa value for the agreement between diagnoses was 0.75 CONCLUSION: The concordance between the diagnoses occurred in most patients investigated presented corresponding to substantial agreement.