Methods: Disutility values for lost and restored teeth were used as to weight the DMFTs of 10 adult patients. This gave two Whole Mouth Utility Scores (WMU). WMU1 down-weighted the utility of restored teeth and subtracted the utility of teeth which had been lost. WMU2 was calculated by subtracting only the utility of lost teeth from the WMU of a completely sound mouth. These scores were then compared to a patient recorded oral health outcome measure recorded by use of a visual analogue scale (VAS). The anchors for the VAS were “my mouth could not be worse” and “my mouth could not be better”.
Results: There was a positive correlation (r = 0.6457) between WMU1 and the patient reported outcome measure (p<0.05) and a negative correlation (r = -0.8383) between WMU1 and DMFT which was significant at the p<0.01 level. There was a statistically significant positive correlation of r = 0.7926 between WMU2 and the patient reported outcome measure (p<0.01) and a negative correlation (r = -0.9393) between WMU2 and DMFT (p<0.01).
The Pearson’s correlation between DMFT and the patient reported outcome measure was -0.8757 which was significant at the 0.01 level.
Conclusion : The results of this small pilot study show that patient reports of their perceived level of health correlate well with DMFT scores. Weighting DMFT scores according to the differential values assigned to missing, or missing and filled teeth does not increase the degree of correlation between the measure and the patient's personal quantification of their oral health. DMFT therefore seems to adequately capture the patient’s sense of well-being.