Swedish Dental Journal

eth and progressive attachment and bone loss”(21),
at least one finding providing soft tissue inflammation,
and one providing loss of supporting tissue
should be used, for example bleeding and bone loss.
Furthermore to be chronic there should be a loss of
supporting tissue over time (20). Until date, no exact
definition exists and very few of the clinicians in this
study comments that there should be a loss of supporting
tissue over time.
In all categories there were clinicians that used
irrelevant findings, i.e. findings not mentioned in
any study or classification to be a finding used to
diagnose chronic periodontitis. Such findings were
for example plaque and calculus. These findings
are considered to be irrelevant since they do not,
per se, describe the disease. Plaque and calculus are
findings that could be present both in patients with
and without periodontitis (3). Even though the dental
hygienist students were in the majority when it
comes to the use of irrelevant findings, both dental
students and supervisors used such findings. The
teachers used few irrelevant findings and were found
to be more evidence-based but the students were not
in compliance with their teachers. Only one dental
teacher used tooth mobility as an irrelevant finding.
None of the supervisors in the Dental Public Health
used attachment loss as a finding when they diagnosed
chronic periodontitis. This was expected since
attachment loss as a measurement of loss of supporting
tissue is hard to perform in daily praxis and
is also time-consuming, and hence, more often used
in research projects. The supervisors in contrast to
the dental teachers have sparse experience of performing
research.
The reasons why dental hygienist students differed
could, according to our experience, depend on
their educational training and the traditional image
of their future work, which mainly consists of prophylactic
treatment, supporting treatment and treatment
of the disease per se, including removal of
the biofilm with bacteria and calculus. The clinical
experience and knowledge of the teachers could also
be an explanation as to why there are differences
between students. The majority of the teachers at
the dental hygienist education are dental hygienists
while they are all dentists at the dentist education.
Conclusions from this study are:
• Variations were found between what findings
different categories of clinicians used when they
diagnose chronic periodontitis.
• Dental hygienists students used a significantly
leisnert, hallström, knutsson
higher number of findings (P