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JAC Advance Access originally published online on April 19, 2007
Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 2007 59(6):1161-1166; doi:10.1093/jac/dkm090
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Antimicrobial practice

Incidence of antibiotic prescribing in dental practice in Norway and its contribution to national consumption

Mohammed Al-Haroni1,2,* and Nils Skaug1

1 Department of Oral Sciences – Oral Microbiology, Faculty of Dentistry, University of Bergen, Norway 2 Centre of International Health, University of Bergen, Norway

Received 17 November 2006; returned 22 December 2006; revised 6 January 2007; accepted 4 March 2007

* Correspondence address. Laboratory of Oral Microbiology, Armauer Hansens Hus, N-5021 Bergen, Norway. Tel: +47-55-97-5784; Fax: +47-55-97-4979; E-mail: Mohammed.Al-Haroni{at}student.uib.no

Objectives: To assess dentistry-based utilization of the 11 antibiotics prescribed by dentists in Norway and its relative contribution to national outpatient consumption and to determine the relationship between numbers of prescriptions and the consumption of these antibiotics.

Methods: Data on national antibiotic prescriptions by dentists in 2004 and 2005 were used. Consumption of the antibiotics was expressed using WHO defined daily doses (DDDs), DDDs per 1000 inhabitants per day (DIDs) and numbers of prescriptions per 1000 inhabitants (PIDs).

Results: Analysis of 268 834 prescriptions issued by 4765 dentists showed that the dentists' prescriptions contributed 8% of the total national consumption of the 11 antibiotics and 13.5%, 2.8% and 1.2% of the national ß-lactam penicillins, macrolides and lincosamides and tetracyclines utilization, respectively. The dentists' contributions to the national phenoxymethylpenicillin, spiramycin and metronidazole consumptions were considerably higher (≥13.2%) than for the other prescribed antibiotics (≤8.6%). There was a strong positive correlation between numbers of DDDs and numbers of prescriptions and between DIDs and numbers of PIDs.

Conclusions: Reliance of Norwegian dentists on phenoxymethylpenicillin as their first choice suggests a low prevalence of antibiotic resistance among oral bacteria in Norway. Norwegian dentists prefer to prescribe narrow-spectrum antibiotics; their prescribing is conservative and relatively low compared with that of physicians.

Keywords: antibiotics , dentists , prescriptions , utilization


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