Oral Surgery, Oral Medicine, Oral Pathology, Oral Radiology, and Endodontology
Oral MedicinePrevalence of subjective dry mouth and burning mouth in hospitalized elderly patients and outpatients in relation to saliva, medication, and systemic diseases*
Section snippets
Hospitalized patients
The first part of this cross-sectional study was carried out at an acute geriatric ward of the Harjula Hospital, Kuopio City Health Center, Finland, on 201 formerly home-living elderly patients who had been referred and admitted to the hospital because of sudden worsening of their general health. The assessment was made by a doctor or nurse on house call. The final group consisted of 175 patients (55 men and 120 women; mean age with SD, 82.0 ± 5.7 years). Sixteen patients were excluded because
Distribution of the patients with and without the symptoms
Table I shows that 110 of the hospitalized patients and 144 of the outpatients complained of the subjective feeling of dry mouth. Dry mouth was reported by 64% of the edentulous hospitalized patients and 53.3% of the edentulous outpatients. Further details with respect to the distribution of the characteristics of the patients with or without dry mouth are given in Table I.
Burning-mouth sensation was reported by 12.6% of the hospitalized patients and 18.3% of the outpatients. Table I gives
Discussion
The prevalence of the subjective oral symptoms investigated was high in our patients—as expected. However, we had anticipated to record distinctly more complaints among the hospitalized patients than in the outpatients in this respect. This, however, was not the case in the present study. It is possible that because our hospitalized patients represent home-living elderly who were taken to the hospital because of sudden worsening of their general health, they had other things on their mind than
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Reprint requests: Hanna Pajukoski, DDS, MSc, University of Helsinki, Institute of Dentistry, P.O. Box 41, FIN-00014