Title

Lifestyle score and oral health behavior impact on oral health-related quality of life among nursing students, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India

Authors

Sandeep Kumar¹, Arunoday Kumar², Amit V Mahuli¹, M. Sudhadevi³, Jay Kishore^4,*, Debashish Basak⁵ & Punit Karmacharya⁶

Affiliation

¹Department of Public Health Dentistry, Dental Institute, RIMS, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India; ²Department of Prosthodontics, Dental College, RIMS, Imphal, Manipur, India; ³College of Nursing, RIMS, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India; ⁴Department of Oral Pathology and Microbiology, Patna Dental College and Hospital, Patna, Bihar, India; ⁵Department of Prosthodontics, Hazaribagh College of Dental Sciences and Hospital, Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, India; ⁶Department of Dentistry, B.P. Eye Foundation, Bhaktapur, Nepal; *Corresponding author

Email

Sandeep Kumar - E-mail: drsandeep40@yahoo.com
Arunoday Kumar - E-mail: dr.arunodayk@gmail.com
Amit V Mahuli - E-mail: amitmahuli@gmail.com
M. Sudhadevi - E-mail: danramsudha@gmail.com
Jay Kishore - E-mail: jay13patna@gmail.com
Debashish Basak - E-mail: dbasak1984@gmail.com
Punit Karmacharya - E-mail: punitkarma@gmail.com

Article Type

Research Article

Date

Received February 1, 2026; Revised February 28, 2026; Accepted February 28, 2026, Published February 28, 2026

Abstract

Nursing students are future healthcare providers and there is limited evidence on how lifestyle and oral health behavior influence oral health quality of life (OHRQoL) in nursing students. This cross-sectional study was conducted in the Ranchi district and included 400 nursing students to assess the lifestyle score, oral health behavior and OHRQoL using their standardized and validated tool. The data was collected using a self-administered questionnaire and showed that 75.8% of nursing students had never been to a dentist for an oral health examination and more than two-thirds of the nursing students demonstrated good Hu-DBI Scores (70.5%) and good OHIP-14 Scores (75.5%). The number of nursing students demonstrating good HPI Scores was very low (8.3%) while, the nurses who had poor Hu-DBI Scores (OR=2.057, p value=0.001) and poor HPI Scores (OR=2.174, p value=0.043) were significantly more likely to have poor OHRQoL. There is a need for policies that will improve the oral health behavior and lifestyle factors of nursing students.

Keywords

Lifestyle, oral health behavior (OHB), oral health quality of life (OHRQoL), nursing students.

Citation

Kumar et al. Bioinformation 22(2): 903-907 (2026)

Edited by

Vini Mehta

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.