Gerodontology Flashcards
Why are more older patients retaining their teeth?
- improved preventative programmes
- changing patient attitudes
- desire for treatments to maintain natural teeth
What challenges do retained teeth is older people pose?
- chronic dental diseases
- caries
- periodontitis
- toothier
What are chronic diseases?
conditions of long duration and generally slow progression
- leading cause of mortality worldwide
What are the common risk factors between destructive dental diseases and chronic systemic diseases?
- smoking
- diet
- glycemic control
Why is becoming edentulous in later life challenging?
- generally less able to adapt to the limitations of complete dentures
What can cause pain and suffering in elderly patients and impair oral function?
- diet
- reduced manual dexterity
- xerostomia
- poly pharmacy
What are the different sections of oral frailty?
- mastication
- difficulty eating hard or tough foods
- inability to chew all types of food
- swallowing
- decreased ability to swallow solid foods
- decreased ability to swallow liquids
- overall poor swallowing function
- oral motor skill
- impaired tongue movement
- speech or phonatory disorders
- salivation
- hypo salivation or xerostomia
What contributes to quality of life for older people?
- having good social relationships
- maintaining social activities and retaining a role in society
- having a positive psychological outlook
- having good health and mobility
- to enjoy life and retain independence and control
What may be an older persons perspective of oral care?
- health declining in the last year of life
- more likely to rate their oral/general health as bad
- twice as likely to report disliking the appearance of their mouth
- more likely to report difficulty with chewing
- more than seven times more likely to report an impaired sense of tase
- increased reporting of oral pain and discomfort
- less likely to utilise oral health services
- oral health behaviours decline towards death due to reduced function
What perspective may medical and caring staff have on older care for elderly patients?
- lack of oral health knowledge
- health and caring facilities with no oral health protocols
- importance of protocols not recognised
- range of products used to provide oral care
- oral products used often wrong
What perspective may relatives have of end of life care?
- cleanliness
- free of pain
- have family present
- dignity maintained
What are the 3 factors important for oral care for elderly patients?
- social wellbeing
- communication
- comfort
- halitosis
- pain and infection
- immune status
- OHRQoL
- function
- nutrition
- communication
How is the decision made to treat or not treat oral disease in elderly patients?
- end of life trajectory tends to be longer
- difficult to predict how long patients will live
- can be more conservative if close to end of life
- risk of over treatment
What is ART and what is its role?
- atraumatic restorative technique
- removal of caries with an excavator
- restored with glass ionomer
- no need for LA
- useful for uncooperative patients
- good survival rate after 2 years
- average care home stay is 2-3 years
- risk factors for failure
- reduced frequency of toothbrushing
- absence of prosthesis
- posterior location of teeth
- higher baseline plaque index
What is the link between older patients and oral candidiasis and how is it treated?
- disease of the diseased
- significantly prevalence in older people
- anti fungal treatment
- miconazole gel placed on denture
