Common symptoms and type of impacted molar tooth in King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital.

BACKGROUND

Patients who suffered from impacted teeth increase in number every year They have a wide range of ages and also have symptomatic or asymtomatic impacted molar teeth. The most common symptoms were pain, dental carious problem, gingivitis and oral infection. This was different in each patient.

OBJECTIVES

1) to study the relation of age and common symptoms among patients with an impacted molar tooth. 2) to study the type of impacted molar tooth

SETTING

Department of Dentistry, King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital

RESEARCH

DESIGN

Descriptive study

MATERIAL AND METHOD: Six hundred and eighty patients who had an impacted tooth were treated at the Department of Dentistry, King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital from June 2002 to December 2005. They were categorized in 5 age groups, namely: < or = 20 years, 21-30 years, 31-40 years, 41-50 years, and > 50 years. Data was collected from history taking, oral and radiographic examinations. The details of the patient's data and tooth's data were recorded, i.e., gender, age, location and type of the impacted tooth including the details of symptoms including pain, dental caries, gingivitis, oral and throat infections.

RESULTS

Four common symptoms including pain, dental caries, gingivitis and oral infection were recorded in each age group. The Pearson Chi - square test showed that in the statistical difference of variation of ages, p-values were 0.001, 0.037, < 0.001, 0.036 for the symptoms of pain, dental carious problem, gingivitis, and infection, respectively. One hundred and seventy eight maxillary third molar impacted teeth and 502 mandibular third molar impacted teeth were found. The impacted molar teeth were classified into five types. There was a mesioangular (402 cases), horizontal (125 cases), vertical (116 cases), distoangular (30 cases) and linguoversion or buccoversion impacted tooth (7 cases). There was a significant difference of type of impacted tooth, p-values were 0.013, 0.002 for the symptom ofpain and oral infection, respectively, but non significant difference for the dental carious problem and gingivitis, p-values were 0.702, 0.367 respectively.

CONCLUSION

The most frequent age group of patients with an impacted molar tooth was 21-30 years. Patient under 30 years had dental carious problems more than other symptoms, while gingivitis was more common in the older group. There was a statistical significant difference of variation of age and symptom. The most common type of impacted molar tooth was mesioangular type.