Prevalence of dental caries and relation with nutritional status among school-age children in resource limited setting of southern Ethiopia

BACKGROUND: Globally, dental caries appears a major public health problem and a widespread non -communicable disease. It is more prevalent among children school-age children (6–12 years), However, there are few studies that correlate dental caries with nutritional status. Thus, this study aims to determine the relation of dental caries with nutritional status among school-age children at resource limited setting of southern Ethiopia. METHODOLOGY: A community-based cross sectional study was employed on randomly selected 761 school-age children of Areka town. Data were collected by face-to-face interviewer-administered questionnaire and clinical assessment of dental caries. After that, the collected data were entered into Epi data 3.2.1 and exported to SPSS 20 for further analysis. On the other hand, bivariate and multiple logistic regression analyses were used to identify the association of dependent and independent variables. p Value < 0.05 was considered to declare a result as statistically significant. RESULTS: Prevalence of dental caries among school-age children was 15.6% (95% CI 13.0–18.5). In technical senses, 4.3% (95% CI 2.9–5.8%) of children were underweight and 14.2% (95% CI 11.7–16.6%) were overweight. However, it has been unfolded that the relationship between dental caries and nutritional status was not statistically significant with a p value (p = 0.32). Factors associated with dental caries were educational status of a mother AOR 3.14, (95% CI 1.03–9.56), not cleaning teeth AOR 7.70, (95% CI 4.00–14.85), sugared coffee drinking AOR 3.22, (95% CI 1.68–6.18.0), sweet food consumption AOR 4.19, (95% CI 1.76–9.96) and non-consuming milk AOR 5.66 ( 95% CI 1.49–21.49). CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION: Dental caries at south Ethiopia were low compared to WHO’s reports on oral health on school-age children. Tooth cleaning habit, parental education, sweet food consumption and milk consumption are associated factors. Therefore, behavioral intervention on dental hygiene and dietary practices are mandatory for school-age children.