Oral hygiene and gestational age at delivery; A cross-sectional survey conducted at a tertiary care hospital

Objective: Assessment of the oral hygiene and addiction habits of postpartum mothers and its relationship with the gestational age at delivery. Method: It was a cross sectional study carried out as a survey of postpartum mothers after having delivered term and preterm newborns. It was conducted between January 2008 - January 2009, at Gynae Unit I of Abbasi Shaheed Hospital and Karachi Medical and Dental College. The total number of postpartum mothers were 189, of which 155 had term delivery and 34 had preterm delivery. The data was collected on a predesigned questionnaire after taking informed verbal consent. The questionnair included demographics such as age, parity, oral hygiene status, brushing habits, addictions, and gestational age at delivery. All the participants were interviewed and findings were recorded on the questionnaire. Results: The data was entered in SPSS version 20. The mean age of women was 27:30 +/- 4.75 years. Of the total 189 postpartum mothers, 106 [56.1%] mothers with term babies had good oral hygiene; 49 [26%] mothers with term babies had poor oral hygiene; 13 [6.9%] mothers with preterm babies had good oral hygiene; and 21[11%] mothers with preterm babies had poor oral hygiene [p<0.0001]. In terms of addiction to smokeless tobacco, etc, 41 [21.7%] addict mothers had term babies while 9 [4.8%] addict mothers had preterm babies. Amongst the 139 mothers with no addiction, 114 [60.3%] mothers had term babies while 25 [13.2%] mothers had preterm babies. The p-value came out to be 0.9982 in this regard. Conclusion: This study suggests that poor oral hygiene of mothers is likely to result in preterm delivery of babies