Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) announced COVID-19 a public health emergency of global concern. The most vulnerable populations are elderly and/or medically compromised people. it is recommended that non-emergency and elective procedures be postponed while dental clinics remain open to patients with urgent needs. Providing oral-health instruction is important to limit the needs of patients to leave their homes for treatment. The aim of this study is to evaluate the knowledge and behaviour of residents in Saudi Arabia towards their oral health during the COVID-19 outbreak.Methods: This study was a cross-sectional descriptive survey. Data was collected through online self-administration of the questionnaire on the Google forms platform. Any relationships between the variables were analysed using Pearson’s chi-squared test. A p value less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant.Results: This study included 1000 participants. 70.7% reported that their oral-health care practices became worse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants’ medical histories revealed that 17.8% had multiple chronic illnesses. Of all respondents, 48.2% believed that COVID-19 is a serious health problem and only 33.4% of respondents were aware that only emergency treatment is being offered at dental clinics during the COVID-19 pandemic.Conclusions: An alarming percentage of participants do not see COVID-19 as threatening to their health. A number of people needed urgent treatment but preferred to stay home because of fear and anxiety connected to the pandemic. The lack of information can lead to the exacerbation of such fear, which in turn causes individuals to neglect their oral health.
Introduction Dental caries is managed by two approaches: prevention which focuses on inhibiting the caries progression, and the traditional approach which is treating caries by drilling and filling. Logically, the first approach is more effective. One of the recently marketed preventive methods for preventing and inhibiting the progression of dental caries is silver diamine fluoride (SDF), which is proven to be minimally invasive and cost-effective, SDF has proven to have a significant success rate in caries prevention, especially in the early childhood caries. Objective The study aims to evaluate general practitioners’ SDF clinical experience, knowledge, professional behavior, and attitudes. Materials and methods The study was a cross-sectional study and we utilized a random sampling of Saudi general dental practitioners from different places in the Hail region, KSA. The study was conducted using papered interview and an online questionnaire followed by educating the dentists about SDF. Results Dentists were asked about SDF, 62.7% answered that they heard about SDF topical application, but the dentists who answered all questions correctly are only 14.89% with no statistically significant difference among gender, age, or sector. Conclusion This study had several limitations. It only included the dental GPA in the Hail region, Saudi Arabia. As is the case with all surveys, only a limited number of questions could be asked. Thus, the information to be obtained is also limited. Future research should therefore include other questions to clarify other aspects which we could not explore in this research. How to cite this article Alshammari AF, Alenzi RH, Alanezi AA, et al. Knowledge and Attitude of Dentists toward Silver Diamine Fluoride in Saudi Arabia. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent 2021;14(5):662–665.
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