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Aims & objectives: The aims of present study were to evaluate the knowledge score of dental caries, oral health among school children and to know the consumption of chocolates, sweets and soft drinks by children in their routine life.
Materials & methods: The study was conducted in two schools of Mandi Gobindgarh. First school has 1-7 standards each with three sections. The second school of Mandi Gobindgarh has standards from 1st to 12th standards. Two institutions were selected in order to assess the knowledge of school children regarding dental caries in both schools and also to compare their knowledge. As the permission was granted from these schools study was conducted after the random selection.
Results: Results showed that 55% of respondents visited dental clinic and overall mean knowledge score among the respondents on dental caries found to be 57.04 percent with S.D as 16.0 percent. 38.7% never drink soft drinks and 53.7% drink occasionally. 61.2% of respondents take sweets and cake occasionally where as 3.8% take thrice a week. Only 2.5% of respondents never take chocolate but 40% of them take occasionally and 27.5% once in a week and 15% of them take twice and thrice a week respectively.
Conclusion: Majority of the respondents who visited dental clinic (55%), out of that 38.8 respondents (70.5%) visited due to toothache. The mean knowledge on prevention of dental caries was different among different age group under study and no difference was seen among males and females. Significant impact of medium of instruction on knowledge of children in prevention of dental caries was also reported in present study. English medium students’ have higher knowledge score (70.24%) whereas students of Punjabi medium showed 43.83 % with the F value worked out to be 173.14 which indicated 5% level of significance.
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Desh Bhagat University,
Off to NH-44, Amloh Road, Mandi Gobindgarh,
District Fatehgarh Sahib, Punjab- 147301, India