TY - JOUR AU - Dieng, Serigne Ndame AU - Kanouté, Aïda AU - Lombrail, Pierre AU - Diouf, Massamba AU - Azogui-Levy, Sylvie PY - 2022/07/26 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Characteristics of oral health literacy in Senegal: A cross-sectional study among women in the Department of Pikine JF - Journal of Public Health in Africa JA - J Public Health Afr VL - 13 IS - 2 SE - Original Articles DO - 10.4081/jphia.2022.2114 UR - https://publichealthinafrica.org/jphia/article/view/2114 SP - AB - <p>Senegal having a significant prevalence of socially differentiated oral diseases, oral health literacy (OHL), an individual and social resource, should be considered alongside a remedial response. This work aimed to analyze women’s OHL characteristics. A cross-sectional study on 315 women in Pikine County was carried out, using the Oral Health Literacy-Adult Questionnaire (OHL-AQ) for the OHL data collection and a questionnaire for the women’s socioeconomic characteristics data. These women had an OHL average score of 6.5±3.1 and a median of 6. Among them, 56.5% had a seemingly low OHL level, a little over 68.9% had a score above the median as regards the “listening, communication and understanding” aspect, 58.4% to “decision making”, 55.2% to “understanding numbers” and 33% to “reading and understanding”. According to a multivariate analysis, secondary and higher educated women (p&lt;0.001) with an active social network (p&lt;0.023), in a wealthy household (p&lt;0.0001) and of nuclear household type (p&lt;0.036) had a higher OHL level. Women in Pikine have low OHL and are from working- class households. Therefore, oral health policies must take into account the women’s social network contribution to the OHL improvement.</p> ER -