Page 119 - Petelin, Ana. 2024. Ed. Zdravje delovno aktivnih in starejših odraslih | Health of the Working-Age and Older Adults. Zbornik prispevkov z recenzijo | Proceedings. Koper: University of Primorska Press

a person’s life satisfaction and self-esteem (Benyamini et al., 2004). The da-
ta show that the self-assessment of oral health reflects the clinical condition of
the oral cavity. Known clinical factors related to oral cavity diseases (such as
the DMFT index or orthodontic irregularities) influence the self-assessment of
oral health. In addition, self-assessment is also associated with more subjective
phenomena such as temporomandibular joint problems (Kojima et al., 2013).
By using the self-assessment of oral health indicator, epidemiological re-
search can easily obtain data on the level of oral health in the population. This
enables the adaptation of existing or the development of new public health
measures targeting the most disadvantaged population groups. In addition,
such an indicator can serve as a benchmark for population-level interventions
and for monitoring treatment outcomes (Lawal, 2015).

Methods
In 2019, we conducted a nationwide study on the oral health of adults based on 119
a representative sample stratified by gender and age. The sample, consisting of
around 3,200 adults aged 19 to 74 years, was compiled by the Statistical Office of
the Republic of Slovenia (SURS) using simple random sampling from the Cen-
tral Population Register. The study was designed as a cross-sectional study and
used the EGOHID questionnaire, which contained both demographic infor-
mation and a self-assessment of oral health. The adults included in the study re-
ceived an invitation to participate in the survey at a home address with a pass- self-assessment of the oral health of adults in slovenia in 2019
word to access the online questionnaire. For participants over the age of 44, a
written questionnaire was enclosed with the notification letter. The survey took
place in spring 2019 and participants received a further postal reminder dur-
ing the survey period.
Participants were asked: »How do you rate your oral health?« and could
choose between the following answers: »Very good«, »Good«, »Fair«, »Poor« or
»Very poor«. Due to the relatively low proportion of people in the worst catego-
ry, we summarised the categories based on the respondents’ self-assessed val-
ues in order to achieve a clearer presentation.
The data were weighted according to gender, age and education. Statisti-
cal analysis using the computer software »IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows«,
version 21.0 (IBM, 2020), allowed us to analyse the baseline data on the prev-
alence of the different oral health assessments across socioeconomic and de-
mographic indicators. We tested the distributions of proportions between dif-
ferent groups (by gender, age, education and living environment) using the
chi-square (χ ) test and the Column Comparison Proportion (CCP) test to
2
compare proportions between different groups. A confidence interval of 95%
was used in both cases.