Prevalence of lichen planus and leukoplakia-a hospital based study

Abstract

Lichen planus is a chronic immune mediated disorder affecting the oral and dermal parts of the body. Oral leukoplakia is a white plaque of questionable risk that carries risk for malignant transformation. The study was carried out in order to find correlation between the clinical variants with age and gender of patients with lichen planus and leukoplakia. The aim of this study is to evaluate the prevalence of lichen planus and leukoplakia among patients visiting the hospital.The study was conducted in a University set up in a Private dental College, Chennai. The study was a retrospective study with a sample size of 142. The data was collected from the hospital digital database by reviewing and analysing the case sheets of patients who visited the hospital between June 2019 to March 2020. The collected data was entered in an excel sheet and was tabulated using SPSS software version 19. Chi-square test was performed.It was observed that both the type, erosive type of lichen planus and the reticular type was prevalent in the female population (36.17% & 27.66% respectively). Erosive type of lichen planus was common at the age group 46-60years (36.17%) and the reticular type was common at the age group 20-45 years (21.28%). Homogeneous and non homogeneous type of leukoplakia both were more prevalent among the male population-73.68% and 21.05% respectively (P value was found to be statistically significant-0.004). The age group 41-60 years were the commonly affected group by both the variants of leukoplakia. Within the limits of the study, it was observed that both the variants of lichen planus, erosive type and reticular type were prevalent among the female population. Erosive type of lichen planus was common at the age group 46-60 years and reticular type of lichen planus at the age 20-45 years. Homogeneous and non-homogeneous types of leukoplakia, both were prevalent in male population with 40-60 years of age being the commonly affected group.