The awareness and educational status on oral health of elite athletes: A cross-sectional study with cluster analysis

In this cross-sectional survey, this study aimed to determine the factors associated with oral health of elite athletes and to determine the clustering tendency of the variables by dendrogram, and to determine the relationship between predefined clusters and see how these clusters can converge. A total of 97 elite (that is, top-level performing) male handball players aged 18 to 29 years participated in the study. Two questionnaires with high validity scores were computed based on the results of the oral health of elite athletes (Geriatric/General Oral Health Assessment Index (GOHAI) and the Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP)). The GOHAI mean and standard deviation score was 8.381±3.988, indicating a low self-perception of oral health by the allocated sample The OHIP mean and standard deviation score was 11.25±3.553, indicating a low self-perception of oral health by the allocated sample. OHIP shows low scores based on these results. According to the first sub cluster; dental floss, dental control, brushing, gingival health, age, dieting and education was found significantly related with these two indexes. The ratios of these variables were as follows: dental floss; 56.7%, dental control; 80.4%, brushing; 99%, gingival health; 96.9%, dieting; 94.8%, education; 100% and the mean age was 18.96±3.731. These results indicate positive correlations among GOHAI and OHIP indexes and positive results for elite athletes included to the current study. As a result, the variables that affect the oral health of the athletes in the study based on multivariate analysis of the clustering results were observed to be healthy at the expected level. The relationships between variables with dendrogram by using hierarchical cluster analysis was discovered. Key words: Elite athletes, oral health, cluster analysis, dendogram.