Master's thesis - Prevalence of Oral Mucosal Lesions Among Libyan Patients in Public and Private Clinics in Eastern Province

Abstract

Background: Oral mucosal lesions (OMLs) are diagnosed worldwide in any popula-tion, age or gender, but in varied prevalence. OMLs can be found in each site of the oral mucosa; for some of them, it is characteristic to have a bilateral/symmetrical or unilat-eral/nonsymmetrical mucosal manifestation. The knowledge about its prevalence in var-ied populations can be useful from a clinical point of view. Oral mucosal lesions (OMLs) are the third-most common oral pathology after caries and periodontal diseases. (Radwan-Oczko et al. 2022). The prevalence of OMLs and normal variants is between 10% and 81% among the vari-ous populations. Epidemiological studies of OLs are still lacking when compared to the studies of dental caries or periodontal diseases. (Campis et al. 2001, Espinoza et al. 2003, Feng et al. 2015,Gupta et al. 2023). Aims of the study: This study was designed to investigate the prevalence of oral muco-sal lesions among routine Libyan dental patients attending dental clinics in Benghazi city and to find out any association with demographic factors, oral habits and denture wearing with such lesions. Subjects and Methods: This is an observational cross sectional study was designed to investigate the prevalence of oral mucosal lesions among sample of routine Libyan den-tal patients who attended the public and private dental clinics. in a period of six months from January to June 2023. A total of 1000 Libyan dental patients were examined for the presence of oral mucosal lesions in a designed form of constructed assessed ques-tionnaire. Demographic information were also collected which include name, age, gen-der, occupation and oral habits such as smoking and alcohol use. The subjects were di-vided according to age into three age groups (<30 years, 30-60 years, > 60 years). Data was uploaded on excel sheet before being entered into SPSS 25 software. Comparison of proportions of participants who experienced mucosal lesion according to their gen- XVII der, age, smoking and alcohol consumption and medical and drug history was carried out using chi-square test. All analyses were conducted at p value less than 0.05. Results: A total of 1000 Libyan dental patients were included in the study. Comparable proportion of males and females with more than half of the participants (53%) were fe-males. Only 5% of these females indicated that they were pregnant. Most of the partici-pants were in the middle age or young age groups. Those aged above 60 years were around 12%. On the other hand, participants in the middle age group (30-60 years) were slightly more than younger age group (46% and 42%, respectively). 25% of the participants had no mucosal lesions. Around 38% of participants had lesions described as normal variations and 37% of them had oral mucosal lesions. White lesion was the most common type (27%) followed by miscellaneous lesions (24%) whereas the pigmented lesions were the least common type (9%).The most common sites for the oral mucosal lesions were as follow, Tongue (31%), buccal mucosa (29%), labial muco-sa (14%) and gingiva (12%) were the most common sites for mucosal lesions. On the other hand, alveolar mucosa and sublingual area were the least affected sites (0.2% and 0.4%, respectively). Conclusion: This study has concluded that Libyan population has a wide range of oral mucosal lesions and normal variants, it is clear that all lesions are benign but few of them have malignant transformation potentiality such as OLP and Oral Leukoplakia. This emphasize the importance of employing conservative measures such as oral habits cessation, periodic re-evaluation and long term follow-up.