Knowledge, Attitude, Awareness of Dental Implant among Common People, Dental Undergraduate Students and General Dental Practitioners

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to assess the Knowledge, Attitude, Awareness about dental implants to replace missing tooth among Common people, Dental Undergraduate students and General Dental practitioners using questionnaire MATERIALS AND METHOD: The study was conducted with 750 participants and as three different groups with three different closed ended self-administered questionnaires for each group. Group I – Common people, Group II - Dental Undergraduate students, Group III – General Dental Practitioners. Each group consists of 250 participants. The responses can be obtained by direct approach and online forms (google forms). Statistical analyses were preformed using Statistical Package For Social science software for windows(SPSS), version 20.0(Armonk,NY). Data comparison was done by applying specific statistical test to find out statistical significance of obtained results. Frequencies were obtained to describe the response distribution of the questionnaire and the dental record abstracted items. RESULTS: In group I, About awareness of the dental implant, 100% of upper class, 73% of the upper middle class, 65.3% of lower middle class, 36.4% of upper lower class and 15.6% of Lower class people have about dental implants. 84.4% of the Lower class, 63.6% of the Upper middle and 34.7% of the Lower middle class has not been aware about dental implants. Their attitude and affordability descends towards lower class people. In group II, that majority of the students perceived to be well informed about dental implants. There were differences in the perception and knowledge at different academic levels. About 182 (72.8%) of the dental students were not aware of the complications and there is lack of any experience with dental implants in 223 (89.2%) of the dental students. In Group III, Out of 250 practitioners 26.4% (66) has undergone dental implant training and 73.6% (184) has not undergone any dental implant training. There is significant difference in knowledge between the general dental practitioners who had undergone training and who had not undergone any training. One third of non-trained general dental practitioners 25% (46) lack the knowledge in all aspects. CONCLUSION: There is increase in awareness and positive attitude towards dental implants in this era and also it had become a field of interest in modern dentistry. Still the general dentist have the major role in educating the patient but the lack of curriculum framework of dental implant in undergraduate level can limit their role in dental implant dentistry