The Journal of the Dental Association of South Africa = Die Tydskrif van die Tandheelkundige Vereniging van Suid-Afrika最新文献

The aim of this project was to determine the oral and dental research output in South African dental schools over a 5-year period. All refereed research articles emanating from South African dental schools which appeared in peer-reviewed journals during the 5 year period, 1990-1994, and which could be traced, were recorded, scrutinized and classified according to the thrust of the research. During this period the 5 schools published 494 articles, 176 from the University of the Witwatersrand, 145 from the University of Stellenbosch, 85 from the University of Pretoria, 54 from the Medical University of Southern Africa and 34 from the University of the Western Cape. Papers were classified into 22 categories. The majority were produced in oral biology, oral pathology and microbiology and dental materials, followed by pharmacology and anaesthetics, epidemiology, community dentistry, preventive dentistry and prosthetic dentistry. A number of articles featured in the rest of the categories. Fifty-five per cent of manuscripts appeared in overseas journals while the bulk of locally published contributions featured in the Journal of the Dental Association of South Africa. The output of research remained constant over the 5 year period with a slight increase of articles in dental materials. The findings indicate that the South African dental schools may have reached a limit in their capacity to produce peer-reviewed research.

Following dentofacial surgical procedures, teeth in segments often do not sense thermal or electric stimuli. This study was undertaken to assess changes in the neural component of the dental pulp after posterior maxillary and mandibular segmental osteotomies, with or without interpositional autogenous bone grafting, in 26 Chacma baboons. Innervation was assessed histologically immediately after operation, and at 3, 6, 12 and 18 months. Statistically significant differences were present between the experimental and control groups. Even after 18 months no nerves were present in any of the mandibular teeth. In maxillary teeth, 50 per cent had demonstrable nerves in the graft group and 40 per cent in the no graft group. As nerve degeneration was present in the experimental teeth, patients should be warned of possible change in tooth sensibility, following these operations. Careful post-operative follow up for long periods in humans following dentofacial surgical procedures is thus essential.

As a result of a growing awareness that the traditional undergraduate curriculum for dental students was overloaded with facts to the detriment of producing dentists skilled in problem-solving and critical thinking, the Faculty of Dentistry of the University of Pretoria was prompted to review the curriculum, teaching methodology and the evaluation of students performance. After much deliberation and planning, it was decided to construct a new curriculum which could support problem-oriented learning, with all its many advantages. The themes of this new curriculum are derived from an analysis of the so-called "clinical reasoning process" and its relationship to the spectrum of relevant diseases. Finally, an example of a clinical problem, which the dental students are expected to solve, is described to illustrate how the educational and training needs are determined.

This study compared the cephalometric features of a group of one hundred children aged from six to sixteen years suffering from chronic perennial allergic rhinitis of differing grades of severity with those of 99 control subjects of similar age. Both samples were drawn from a Children's Hospital which has a large population of patients with chronic perennial allergic rhinitis attending the Allergy Clinic. Lateral cephalometric head films of each subject were recorded and a series of measurements made to assess and compare the craniofacial morphology. The data were statistically analysed. The study found that the children suffering from chronic perennial allergic rhinitis had longer and more divergent facial patterns as well as horizontally shorter maxillae than those in the control group. In addition, those parameters associated with increased vertical dimension and hyperdivergence demonstrated progressive expression with increasing severity of the chronic perennial allergic rhinitis.