Marcenes, Wagner Segura; (1991) Relationship between oral health status and marital quality and work stress. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This study aims to investigate whether oral health status is associated with work stress and marital quality. The term stress was applied to define the stimuli themselves and not to the body reaction in response to a variety of physical or psychological stimuli. Marital quality is defined as the subjective evaluation of a married couple's relationship on a number of dimensions and evaluations (Spanier and Lewis, 1980). The hypothesis is that a given set of psychosocial factors, if favourable, will predispose family members to oral health, or alternatively, if unfavourable, will predispose to oral disease. It is hypothesised that families whose members experienced high levels of communication, companionship, and satisfaction with the partner and children are more likely to show better oral health status than families whose members experienced low levels of communication, companionship and satisfaction with the partner and children. In addition, fathers who experienced low levels of stress at work tend to have a better oral health status than fathers who experienced high levels of stress at work. The study was conducted in Belo Horizonte, Brasil. 164 families, equally distributed over four socio-economic groups, were randomly selected from children from private and state schools. The parents' age ranged from 35 to 44 years old. Each family had a child aged 13 years old. Data were analysed using multiple regression analysis (dental caries data) and logistic regression analysis (periodontal data). Age, socio-economic status, gender, dental attendance, toothbrushing frequency, sugar consumption and type of toothpaste were considered in the analysis. The results showed a highly significant linear relationship between marital quality and the father's, mother's and child's dental caries status. Work related mental demand, work control, and work variety were not significantly associated with fathers' dental caries status. A significant relationship between periodontal health status and marital quality was found for fathers and mothers and a significant relationship between work related mental demand and fathers' periodontal health status was also found. It was concluded that marital quality is an important determinant of oral health status - dental caries and periodontal disease - and that work related mental demand is an important determinant of periodontal health status.

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