| dc.description.abstract | Dental and oral health is one of the most important things for children's
growth and has a major impact on children's health and quality of life, especially for
children with special needs. Blind children are children with special needs, and they
have a high risk for dental and oral hygiene. Blind children cannot see how the plaque
conditions on their teeth's surface could result in inadequate oral hygiene care, thus
they have a higher increase in dental caries than normal children. The research was
carried out in Deli Serdang, one of the districts that have a special foundation for
blind children in North Sumatra. The purpose of this study is to determine whether
there are differences in dental caries experiences between blind and normal children
in Deli Serdang based on deft and DMFT index, with normal children's samples taken
from Anastasia Foundation and blind children's samples taken from YAPENTRA, as
both foundations have similar backgrounds.
The research used an analytical method with a cross-sectional design to find
whether there are differences in the experience of dental caries among blind and
normal children. The research uses a purposive sampling technique with a sample of
82 children that consists of 41 blind children and 41 normal children. These samples
were divided into two assessment groups: dental caries in mixed dentition period and
dental caries in permanent dentition period. Data used were processed univariately
and bivariately. Since the data used were not normally distributed, this study also
uses nonparametric tests, namely Mann-Whitney and Kruskal Wallis.
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Results of this study showed a significant difference in dental caries
experience between blind children and normal children in permanent dentition period
with p-value = 0.029 (p > 0.05). Dental caries experience between blind children and
normal children in mixed dentition period was statistically insignificant with p-value
= 0.457 (p>0.05) for the deft index and p-value = 0.846 (p > 0.05) for the DMFT
index.
This study found that dental caries experience in blind children and normal
children in Deli Serdang is still in the low to medium category. To maintain children's
dental and oral health, caries prevention programs must be carried out to achieve
caries-free children in Deli Serdang. This study is limited by the lack of age
distribution in the sample used due to insufficient data on the sample of blind
children, since the research only uses samples from blind children foundations in Deli
Serdang. This study suggests further research to be carried out with a larger number
of samples. | en_US |
