Evaluation of the Educative Intervention “Your smile” in disabled children

Abstract

Introduction: children with mental retardation have an abnormal development of the psychical processes, mainly the superior cognitive ones, the voluntary processes of the memory, the logic verbal thought and language, among others, all of them as the result of a brain organic lesion.
Objective:  the aim of the research was evaluating the application of an educative intervention with themes related with oral hygiene, prevention and dental caries in children with the purpose of improving their oral health status, given the special characteristics of them.
Materials and Methods: it was evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed intervention in children with mental retardation aged 5-12 years who belong to this health area, being 23 children in total.
Results: the higher percent of the studied children were male, aged 8 and 10 years; before the educative intervention a great number of children had an inadequate oral hygiene, did not know dental caries risk factors and the preventive methods in Odontology, while after applying the intervention these aspects remarkably improved.
Conclusions: according to the obtained results it could be concluded that this educative preventive strategy allowed answering to the main identified problems and reaching a higher level of oral health in children with mental retardation in scholar age, because it prevented the oral caries formation in deciduous and permanent teeth, since at the end of the intervention the achieved results were evaluated as good.