Sports dentistry awareness in a population of young basketball players: a pilot study

Abstract

Introduction: Practicing sports places the human body at constant risk of injury. The most vulnerable and less protected body area is the face, thus, a greater risk for orofacial injury exists, being the most common: dental injury [1,2]. Dentistry and sports are usually connected by dental trauma [1]. Sports dentistry is not only the treatment of dental and/or orofacial injuries but also its prevention and the empowerment of athletes to ensure better results [1]. The aim of this study was to access the level of awareness to dental injury in young basketball players. Materials and methods: A sample of 97 individuals with ages between 12 and 17 from a total of 141 Sport Lisboa e Benfica basketball team’s players were selected. These were evaluated and characterized by: age, sex, dentist visits and basketball specific guidelines from dentists. Informed consent from parents was obtained. Prior to data collecting the Ethics Committee of the Instituto Universitário Egas Moniz approved the study. A descriptive statistical analysis with crosstabs procedures was applied to check frequencies using the SPSS Statistics 20.0 software. Results: Average age was 13,6 years. 42,3% of the population were women with an average age of 13,6 years and 13,7 for the men. From the players that visit the dentist, 26,8% of the male population and 24,4% of female population received guidelines to their specific sports activity. 3,6% of the male received guidelines but they didn’t visit the dentist. Discussion and conclusions: There is a high prevalence of orofacial lesions in basketball players and a low awareness and perception of the importance of the use of mouthguards [3]. It is necessary to educate and inform through dentists, both players and coaches, for sports dentistry to be improved. A dentist should be part of the teams to raise awareness about oral injuries and to increase prevention [4]. Only about a quarter of the young basketball players surveyed were instructed by a dentist, suggesting that there is no awareness among the teams of adding a dentist to the medical monitoring of their athletes.