Journal of Dental Medicine

Background and Aim: School health workers have an important role in education and prevention of common oral and dental diseases. An organized program can be helpful in training and shaping the proper behavior. This study has evaluated the knowledge, attitude and practice of schools health workers in Tabriz about oral and dental health in 2007-2008.
Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional and descriptive study was performed in primary schools in Tabriz. Questionnaires were sent to the schools that had health workers. Levels of the knowledge, attitude and practice of the health workers who had answered this questionnaire were evaluated. SPSS software and independent T-Test and Paired- Sample T-Test were used for analyzing the results.
Results: Fifty eight out of 64 school health workers were women. Mean age of school health workers was 45 years. Forty four of school health workers had passed special course about oral health and dental health. 49 of them had passed special educational course the mean of acquired knowledge score was 6.77 out of 10 and women's scores were significantly higher. Also women had more work experience than men. The mean of acquired attitude and practice scores were 7.42 and 7.14 out of 10, respectively.
Conclusion: Findings show that performing of the educational courses during work and experience has an effective role in the scales of the health workers. Progress in this situation can be achieved by retraining programs and accessible pamphlets.

  Background and Aims: Diagnosis of vertical root fractures often poses a clinical dilemma. Diagnosis of VRF in intraoral radiographs, except in cases where the beam is perpendicular to the direction of fracture is difficult. Misdiagnosis often leads to wrong decisions about the design of teeth future treatment plan. The aim of this study was to determine the diagnostic accuracy of reverse contrast enhancement options in digital radiography, and to compare it with the original images to find a suitable method to detect vertical root fracture.

  Materials and Methods: In this experimental study, digital radiography with phosphor plate detector was taken from 40 extracted single root teeth. From each intact and fractured tooth, the original and reverse contrast images captured and stored. Two expert observers viewed the images twice with an interval of two weeks. Diagnostic criteria (Accuracy, PPV, NPV, Specificity and Sensitivity) in form of absolute and complete for each observer and each images was calculated. Inter and intra observer reliability was obtained using Mc-Nemar test.

  Results: No significant differences in inter-observer reliability between the initial appearance and reverse contrast was observed (P>0.05), but in view of the intra-observer reliability in two cases, the difference was significant (P<0.05). No significant difference in the accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and PPV was observe between the two used images (P>0.05), whereas significant difference between the two images was found in NPV index (P<0.05).

  Conclusion: The use of reverse contrast enhancement option for detection of vertical root fracture did not show significant difference from initial view.