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Introduction: Oral health promotion through schools is recommended by WHO for improving knowledge, attitude and behaviour related to oral health and for prevention of dental diseases among school children. In India, 70 -72% of population live in the rural areas of which more than 40% are children. These children tend to be more vulnerable to oral health problems. Aim and Objective: To assess prevalence of dental caries and the effectiveness of demonstration on dental hygiene among primary school students. Material and Method: The study was a cross-sectional study conducted at selected schools of Rani rural community of Kamrup District, Assam. 118 primary school students of class IV and V were selected using consecutive sampling technique. The subjects were assessed for the presence of dental caries using dmft scoring and observed for their practice of brushing with Fones method of brushing. Later demonstration for the Fones method was given to the participants and post test was done to evaluate the effectiveness of demonstration. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS version 20 software. Results: The study showed that more than half i.e., 92 (78%) of the students have dental caries. It was found that in pre-test, 79 (61%) of the participants have good practice of dental hygiene which was increase to 93 (78.8%) in post test. Again, in pre-test 46 (39%) of the participants have poor practice of dental hygiene, which was reduced to 25 (21.2%) in post test. The mean post test practice score (7.03) is higher than the mean pre test practice score (4.70) of dental hygiene. The median post test practice score (7) is also higher than the median post test practice score (5) of dental hygiene and the post test SD (0.67) seems to be less disperse than the pre test SD (0.73) of dental hygiene. It also shows that the "t" value (-28.482) and p -value 0.00 is highly significant at 0.05 level of significance. So it is evident that the demonstration on Fones method of brushing is effective in increasing the dental hygiene practice among the students. Conclusion: Regulating good practice of dental hygiene is important during the early school period. As health personnel, community nurse can take active role in imparting information on dental hygiene practice among students by conducting school health programme and demonstrating on brushing technique. And also recommending inclusion of dental hygiene in the curriculum of the school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim The study compared the anesthetic effectiveness of articaine and lignocaine when premolars are extracted bilaterally for orthodontic purposes. Material and methods This prospective split-mouth study was performed on 30 cases selected from orthodontic referral patients reporting to the Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Department at Maharaja Ganga Singh Dental College and Research Center, Rajasthan, India, for bilateral extraction of premolars under local anesthesia. We used 4% articaine hydrochloride and adrenaline 1:100000 (AH) as group A and 2% lignocaine hydrochloride with adrenaline 1:100000 (LH) on the control side as group B. For premolar anesthetization, 0.6-1.6 ml of AH and 1-2 ml of LH were injected submucosally in the buccal vestibular area. The extraction procedure was then carried out after achieving adequate anesthesia. The pain was assessed with Visual Analog Scale. The average onset time and duration of anesthesia were recorded. Data collected were summarized with descriptive statistics. The SPSS version 23.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, New York) was used for data entry, validation, and analysis. Means of continuous variables were compared using the student t-test. All tests were 2-tailed and significant at equal or less than 0.05. (p≤0.05). Results When comparing the overall anesthetic efficiency, Group A had a lower overall pain score of 0.43 while Group B had a higher overall pain score of 2.9. The average onset time of anesthesia in Group A was 1.2 minutes and 2.55 minutes in Group B. In Group A, the average duration of anesthesia was 70 minutes, and 46.5 minutes in Group B. These parameters were statistically significant with a p-value of <0.05. Conclusion The study concluded that as an alternative to lignocaine, articaine could be used effectively for maxillary premolar extractions for orthodontic reasons obviating palatal injection which is very painful to the patient., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright © 2023, Jaiswal et al.)