A Cross-sectional Study on the Relationship between Questionnaire-based Subjective Symptoms of Oral Function and Oral Hypofunction in Dental Clinic Outpatients

<p>　Objective：To enable screening of oral hypofunction from a patient’s subjective complaints, we aimed to clarify the relationship between the subjective evaluation of oral function using a questionnaire and oral hypofunction.</p><p>　Subjects and Methods：For this cross-sectional study, 151 outpatients aged 40 years or older（38 men, 113 women, age 71.0±11.3 years）who underwent regular dental examinations at three dental clinics in Tokyo and Chiba prefectures, Japan, and who consented to join this study were enrolled. A nine-question questionnaire on oral function was used as the subjective evaluation, and a clinical examination was performed to diagnose oral hypofunction. The χ² test was used to examine the relationship between the presence or absence of subjective complaints and the presence or absence of oral hypofunction. The receiver operating characteristic（ROC）curve was used to analyze the number of subjective symptoms to screen for oral hypofunction. The significance level was set at 0.05.</p><p>　Results：Of the 151 participants, 107（70.9%）had one or more subjective complaints. Forty-six participants（30.5%）had subjective symptoms and were diagnosed with oral hypofunction. A relationship between the presence or absence of subjective symptoms and the presence or absence of oral hypofunction was found（p=0.003）. The combination with the highest sensitivity and specificity was obtained when the number of subjective symptoms was 1 or more. In the analysis using the ROC curve, when the number of subjective symptoms hits was 1 or more, the sensitivity was 88.5, the specificity was 38.9, and the AUC was 0.64, which was the highest cutoff value for the sum of sensitivity and specificity.</p><p>　Conclusions：The results of this study suggest that the presence or absence of subjective symptoms as determined by a questionnaire can be used as a screening method for oral hypofunction.</p>