Comparison and Evaluation of Prefabricated Mouthguards and Replaced Customized Mouthguards in Children of Bhopal

Abstract

To assess the change in perspective, when prefabricated mouthguards were replaced with customized mouthguards among children in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Materials and Method: This survey was conducted among children between 8 to 18 years age in two phases. The first phase included a 10 item questionnaire to be filled by athletes participating in different sports which consisted of three sections a) mouthguard awareness b) reasons for not wearing a mouthguard and the third section consisted of c) evaluating the level of acceptance of customised mouthguards. The latter part of the survey was completed after 25 randomly selected participants who were made to use customised mouthguards to evaluate the acceptability for the same. The statistical analysis was performed using the SPSS (21.0 version; Inc., Chicago IL, USA) for descriptive and multivariate analysis, and the level of statistical significance used in this study was at P < 0.005 Results: Use of contact mouthguard was more significant (P-value was 0.0001.) when the use of mouthguards were compared with  non contact sports. It was found that custom made mouthguards are more comfortable than prefabricated one with significant difference (P= 0.051). Conclusion: Custom made mouthguards can prevent dental and orofacial injuries better than the preformed mouthguards. So considering the high level of willingness to wear mouthguards efforts should be made towards increasing the awareness on its benefits. The players were comfortable with custom made mouthguards so it can be proposed to the government officials to make their use mandatory with some subsidy to decrease the number of accidents