NCBI ROFL: Oral malodor and related factors in Japanese senior high school students.

"Oral malodor (halitosis or bad breath) might be an important motivation tool for improving oral health in adolescents. There are few studies that report the epidemiology of oral malodor in high school students and the relationships with lifestyle and oral health status. This research was conducted to obtain underlying data for introducing an oral health education program which targeted prevention of oral malodor as a motivation tool for changing oral health behavior in high school students. METHODS: A questionnaire, school oral examination, and oral malodor measurement were conducted on senior high school students in a Tokyo metropolitan school in 2007. A total of 474 students (male: 219, female: 255) were used for the analysis. RESULTS: Over 42% of subjects reported that they had experienced anxiety, or were conscious of oral malodor, on at least 1 occasion. The students who had detectable oral malodor comprised 39.6% of subjects. The binary logistic ...