Oral- Health-related Quality of Life and Psychosocial Aspects in Prosthodontic Patients

Objectives: Prosthodontic status might influence oral- health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) and perhaps psychosocial aspects of the patients. Purpose of this pilot study is to explore possible impact of change in prosthodontic status on OHRQoL and psychological factors
Methods:
In this prospective, pilot clinical study 49 prosthodontic patients (30 females) with an average age of 57.4±14.9 years were included. All participants completed the German versions of OHIP-49 and DASS-42 at their first visit in the clinic and after 3 months independent of prosthodontic treatment. The statistical analysis was done descriptively and for the comparisons the Wilcoxon test was used. The level of significance was set at 0.05.

Results: 24% of the patients received some sort of prosthodontic treatment during the observation time and 76% not. The non-treatment group showed a statistically significant improvement for two domains of OHIP i.e. “functional limitation” and “psychological discomfort” and for the category “stress” and the sum score of DASS. In contrast, the prosthodontic treatment group showed no significant changes in any of the studied variables
Conclusions: Due to the low number of patients and the short observation period, the results should be interpreted with caution. Nevertheless, it is interesting that a significantly different degree of change of OHIP and DASS scores could be observed despite the absence of prosthodontic treatment. Hence it is questionable whether the OHIP is solely influenced by prosthodontic treatment or probably also by other e.g. psychological aspects. Further analysis of these instruments in future studies is proposed.