title: Health literacy among Indian adults seeking dental care.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Poor literacy can impede one's ability not only to seek out needed health information but also to process, understand and use it to make appropriate health care decisions. The objective of the study was to assess the health literacy among adult patients seeking oral health care at in a private dental hospital in Bangalore, Karnataka, India.
  
  
  METHODS
  A cross sectional questionnaire survey was carried out on 500 subjects. The questionnaire designed by Chew and colleagues (2004) was modified and used as the survey instrument. To be eligible to participate in the study, the participants had to be aged above 18 years and able to read or write English/Kannada (local language). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Student's t-test (two tailed, independent) was used to find the significance of study parameters at 95% confidence interval.
  
  
  RESULTS
  About 60.4% of the subjects had low health literacy level, 29.4% average and only 10.2% had high health literacy levels. Age and educational qualification had a suggestive significant difference with the mean health literacy scores while gender did not have any significant difference. Subjects who had completed post-graduation (57.8%) too had low health literacy levels.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  A large number of patients have low levels of health literacy that may interfere with their ability to process and understand basic health information.
authors.affiliation: Department of Public Health Dentistry, AB Shetty Memorial Institute of Dental Sciences, Nitte University, Deralakatte, Mangalore, Karnataka, India.
authors.forename: Audrey M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: D'Cruz
authors.forename: M R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Shankar Aradhya
keywords: Health information; health literacy; health providers