Background: Dental caries is the most common oral and dental disease especially among preschool children. Silver diamine fluoride (SDF) is an inexpensive topical medication that is used to stop caries in infants who cannot undergo dentistry treatments. The aim of this study was to assess the knowledge, attitude, and practice of Iranian pedodontists regarding SDF.
Materials and Methos: This cross-sectional analytical-descriptive study was done on 190 dentists who were members of Iranian association of paediatric dentistry. The respondents received an online questionnaire that contained f four sections (demographic information, knowledge, attitude, and practice). The data were analysed by Mann-Whitney, Chi-squared and Spearman statistical tests (α=0.05).
Results: The results showed that 93.7% of the pedodontists had good knowledge of SDF, and none of them had poor knowledge 48.9% of specialists in this research had a positive attitude towards SDF. Out of 190 pedodontists, 44.7% used SDF to treat of carious lesions of deciduous teeth.
Conclusion: The level of knowledge and attitude of paediatric dentists towards SDF was favourable and was not related to age, gender, working background, and occupational status. However, there was an inverse significant relationship between the score of attitudes and working background of pedodontists; meaning that with increase in their working background, the positive attitude decreased among them. There was a direct relationship between level of knowledge and attitude of pedodontists. Regarding practice, the obtained results were relatively favourable. As for the practices, the results were relatively favourable, with a significant relationship to age, gender, and working background