Children’s Perception about Other Children with Dental Fluorosis – a Cross-sectional Study

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the perception of children of age 12-15 years about other children with visible dental fluorosis
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted using self-administered social attribute questionnaire (11 itemed - four-point Likert scale) to capture young people’s dental appearance-related judgements. A total of 455 children aged 12-15 years of age, from 6 different schools (3 government and 3 private), participated in the study. All the children were given either a set of full-face photographs of a boy and a girl without dental fluorosis or digitally modified anterior teeth to show visible dental fluorosis. It was calculated that 212 participants from each group (with/without fluorosis) would be needed to yield an 80% power to detect a significant difference in Total Attribute Score (TAS), according to the previous study (Craig et al, 2015) where a threshold for significance was set at 5% and design effect of 2.
Results: A total of 437 children completed all the stages of this survey out of which 53.8% (235) were males with a mean age of 13.99±0.825. The mean TAS among fluorosis group (25.9±4.73) was significantly lower than that without fluorosis (34.8±4.83) (p<0.001). With respect to gender, in both the male and female photographs, fluorosis group had significantly lower mean TAS than that without fluorosis (p<0.001, <0.001, <0.001 and <0.001) respectively.
Conclusions: Children in our study perceived that fluorosis can have negative impact on their appearance and young people might make negative judgements about other children with fluorosis.