Individuals seeking dental treatment often present with underlying medical conditions, which may or may not be managed with a variety of medications [1–16]. These comorbidities impact on the delivery of dental treatment and the importance of understanding the health status of the dental patient is well recognised [17–19]. The safety and effectiveness of dental treatment provision rests on the degree to which an individual’s medical status is considered in dental treatment planning. This consideration in turn is highly dependent on the clinician’s knowledge of internal medicine and its application to the dental setting. Shortcomings of the dental curricular with respect to the preparation of students to deal with patients with underlying medical conditions have been demonstrated in a number of studies [20, 21].
Although grounding in general medicine is essential for the dental students in the modern era; understanding the most commonly encountered medical conditions in the dental setting, has the potential to shift the focus of internal medicine teaching. This may motivate students to learn internal medicine through interest and appreciation of relevance of subjects discussed. Focusing teaching around student experience may also help the students to better contextualize their theoretical knowledge [22].
A number of studies have been undertaken with the aim of ascertaining the types of medical conditions prevalent among dental patients in general [1, 8, 10] and specialist practice [9, 10, 12, 14, 15] as well as in dental school patient populations [2, 3, 5–7, 9–14, 16]. The prevalence of medical problems among dental patients has been shown to vary greatly, ranging from 1% − 83%, depending on the population studied [1–3, 6–10, 12–16]. Elderly patients and those attending public dental facilities have been shown to demonstrate increased prevalence of systemic disease compared to their younger counterparts or those seeking treatment in the private sector [10, 12, 13]. While a broad range of comorbidities has been reported, cardiovascular disease [5–10, 12–14, 16], respiratory conditions [2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10–12, 14, 16], endocrine disorders [1–3, 6, 7, 10–14, 16], bleeding pathosis [1, 5, 11], arthritis [2, 6–8, 11–13, 16], and allergies [1, 2, 6, 7, 9–11, 13, 16] constitute the most commonly reported medical problems encountered in the dental settings. Despite fewer studies reporting medication use, the most commonly prescribed medications parallel the most frequently encountered medical problems, with medications used in the management of cardiovascular disease the most commonly reported [6, 7, 13, 15].
At present there is a general paucity of Australian data [8, 10] and a lack of data concerning the medical status of patients seen by the dental students in Western Australia. In view of this, the aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of medical conditions and medication use among dental patients attending the general dental clinics for a routine dental examination at the Oral Health Centre of Western Australia (OHCWA), University of Western Australia. It is anticipated that results of this study will shed light on the types of comorbidities of dental patients encountered by the dental students during their clinical studies, thus stimulating discussion around internal medicine content delivery, with the view to better prepare the graduates to deal with the medically compromised patients.