Investigation of color vision defect among dental practitioners

Abstract

Purpose: Most of dental practitioners use the traditional method for selecting shade which is based on the experience and the judgment of the trained human eye of the operator. Dentists having defective color vision may be unaware of their defect or may have problems in perceiving color vision as normal dentists do. This study was aimed to investigate color vision defect in adult dental practitioners.

Methods: 57 subjects (41 male, 16 Female) were recruited for the study from Dentistry College at KSU & Dental Technology Department at CAMS. The subjects were aged between 20 and 40 years (mean= 24.38), they were dentists, dental students and dental technologist. Ishihara Color Test and Farnsworth dichotomous test D-15 were used in this study. The Ishihara test was taken 1minute in range. The Farnsworth dichotomous test D-15 was taken twice for each subject with 6 minutes in range.

Results: 12.79% of subjects have color vision defect, 5 Males (8.7%) have Protan and 2 Females (3.5%) have Protan during the first test of Farnsworth D-15; but only 2 Males (3.5%) have Protan during the retest of Farnsworth D-15.

Conclusions: The prevalence of color vision defect among dental practitioners in this study is higher than the prevalence in a previous study (12.3% of 160 subjects). Color vision test should be applied to dental practitioners in order to avoid any defect for shade matching of teeth.

Keywords: 471 color vision