Poor Oral Hygiene and Middle Ear Infections: Any Relationship?

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationship between poor oral hygiene and middle ear infections. 59 children between 3–12 age intervals were included in this study. The ears were examined by microscope. The findings were marked according to Kempthorne clinical scale and tympanograms were performed. For data analysis of dental caries, dft and DMFT indexes were used in accordance with WHO (World Health Organization) criteria for oral health surveys. The oral hygiene status was determined by using Simplified Oral Hygiene Index of Greene and Vermillion. The scores of 0–1 were classified as low, and of 2–3 as high oral hygiene index (OHI-S). The low OHI-S was taken as the control group (30 patients). The high OHI-S was taken as the study group (29 patients). The effusion scores, the compliance values and the middle ear pressure values in the two groups were compared. The difference between the effusion score values of the control and study groups was found to be statistically meaningful (p = 0.338, and the χ² = 2.167). The compliance values of the control and study groups did not differ meaningfully statistically (p = 0.671). However, there was a statistically meaningful low middle ear pressure (p = 0.044, χ² = 4.069) in the control group. Since this finding is expected in the study group, instead of the control group, we did not make an issue of this result. We conclude from these clinical results that there is no statistically meaningful relation between the oral hygiene index and the middle ear.