Current Knowledge and Awareness among Paedodontists of Maharashtra Regarding Prevention of Infective Endocarditis

BACKGROUND Infective endocarditis is an infection of the endothelium of heart and heart valves with serious and fatal complications that often requires long-term treatment. Bacteraemia is considered to be an important step for the onset of infective endocarditis (IE) and mainly induced by invasive dental treatments, including tooth extraction, periodontal surgery, scaling and root planing. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the knowledge among the paedodontists concerning the preventive measures for infective endocarditis and to spread the awareness about the same, thus filling the clinical practice gap between dentists and cardiologists by helping in making collaborative decisions. METHODS A questionnaire survey was given to the paedodontists in India in order to collect information regarding their current common knowledge about infective endocarditis and for the future construction of an approach to improve this situation. RESULTS 68.4 % of the paedodontists taking the survey preferred giving antibiotic prophylaxis mainly orally whereas 21.1 % preferred to give it orally rather than IV and 10.5 % of them preferred IV rather than oral. None of them preferred giving antibiotics intravenously. With regard to the type of antibiotics preferred, most preferred was oral amoxicillin (89.5 %) and other antibiotics were (10.5 %); whereas, no one preferred IV ampicillin. 89.5 % of our respondents feltthat antibiotic prophylaxis was definitely needed whereas 10.5 % of them felt that it was partially needed. CONCLUSIONS Practitioners, cardiologists and the dentists need to discuss the potential benefits and also the harm of antibiotic prophylaxis with their patients before a decision is made about antibiotic administration. KEY WORDS Infective Endocarditis, Paedodontists, Cardiologists