Purpose: To assess patient self-perception of overall dental appearance and of potentially localized dyschromic teeth and to compare them to the perception of the treating dentist.
Materials and methods: A sample of 160 patients from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, answered a questionnaire regarding the self-perception of their dental appearance and of potential localized dental discolorations. The same questions were answered by their dentist, without knowing their answers, after clinical examination of each patient. Each patient and the dentist were asked to indicate a tooth with a pleasant color to be considered as reference. Color measurements of teeth indicated as dyschromic and of the reference teeth were performed using a spectrophotometer. Color differences were calculated using the ΔE₀₀ formula.
Results: Tooth color was considered the most disturbing factor of their dental appearance by 41.25% of patients. Most patients (58.12%) acknowledged localized dyschromic teeth in their dental arches. Agreement between patients and dentist regarding the identification of dyschromic teeth was found in 61.87% of cases. The DE₀₀ between the reference teeth and the teeth considered dyschromic by both patients and dentist ranged between 0.8 and 23.1. Disagreement between patients and dentist was found in 38.12% of situations. For teeth considered dyschromic only by patients, the ΔE₀₀ ranged between 0.8 and 23.1. For teeth considered dyschromic only by the dentist, the ΔE₀₀ ranged between 0.8 and 25.
Conclusion: Most patients expressed concerns regarding their overall dental color and perceived themselves as having teeth with localized dyschromia. More than a third of the investigated patients had different perceptions regarding dyschromic teeth compared to their dentist. The majority of ΔE₀₀ values calculated between dyschromic and reference teeth exceeded the perceptibility and acceptability thresholds.