Prevalence of smoking in patients with aphthous stomatitis: A retrospective case-control study

Apthous stomatitis represents one of the most common ulcerations occurring in the oral cavity. This ulcer has an exclusive predilection of affecting the non-keratinized mucosa only. The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of smoking in patients with apthous stomatitis. Seventy-six patients with recurrent apthous stomatitis attending Saveetha Dental Hospital, Chennai were included in the study. The data gathered was entered into an excel table, and the data analysis was done in SPSS. The data analysis revealed that the mean age of the collected samples of 76 patients was 32.21 years, and 67.1% of the samples were males. Analyzing the clinical variants, 70 patients had minor apthous stomatitis, five patients had major apthous stomatitis, and one patient had herpetiform apthous stomatitis. Results showed that patients who are not smokers have a higher rate of recurrence of recurrent apthous stomatitis compared to patients who are smokers with 6.6% being the prevalence rate for smokers and 93.4% being the prevalence rate for non-smokers. Data analysis was done using a chi-square analysis between the clinical variants of recurrent apthous stomatitis and smoking habits (chi-square-1.132; df-2; p-0.05) we found the results were statistically significant (P=0.05) which implies there were less self-reported diabetics in this study Prevalence of smoking in patients with recurrent apthous stomatitis is significantly lower than patients who are not smokers. The reason for the decreased occurrence of apthous stomatitis in smokers may be due to the increased keratinization of the mucosa.