Dental diseases are the most common chronic diseases worldwide. Healthy teeth are vital for quality of life, particularly diet and nutrition. However, little information exists to inform health policymakers about potentially long-lasting influences of early-life conditions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relation between early-life socioeconomic conditions and number of natural teeth at age 50 and above.
Analyses were conducted on cross-sectional data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE wave 5), which includes information on 41 560 respondents aged 50 years or older from 14 European countries and Israel. Using SHARE life history information, a series of regression models (OLS, Tobit) were estimated to analyse the relationship between socioeconomic conditions in earlier life and the number of teeth at age 50+.
Childhood socioeconomic background was associated with the number of natural teeth at age 50 and above, even after controlling for current determinants of oral health. Respondents who had had more than 25 books in their childhood household had a mean 1.4 (95% CI: 1.2-1.5) more teeth than respondents with fewer books. Respondents who reported poor financial conditions during childhood had a mean 0.6 (95% CI: 0.3-0.9) fewer teeth than respondents who reported better financial conditions in childhood.
These findings substantiate the association between socioeconomic conditions in the early years of life and tooth retention to older adulthood and highlight the long-lasting relation between childhood living conditions and oral health through the lifecourse.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 21 May 2019.
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#10,277,461
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Outputs from Community Dentistry & Oral Epidemiology
#564
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#114,072
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Outputs of similar age from Community Dentistry & Oral Epidemiology
#7
of 13 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,411,289 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 70th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,634 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 9.9. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 65% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 13 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 46th percentile – i.e., 46% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
