Area Level Deprivation and Dental Caries

Objectives: To investigate the effect of area level deprivation on having dental decay in the united kingdom population. Methods: A national representative UK Data from Adult Dental Health Survey, 2009 was used in this study. In this survey, clinical examination was done to measure active dental decay. In this study participants were categorised into two having and not having active decay. Area level deprivation was measured using Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), 2010. There are six domains, income; employment; health deprivation and disability; education, skills and training; housing; and geographic access to services that determine the IMD score. IMD scores were divided into quintiles with higher quintiles indicating higher deprivation. Multivariate logistic regression was used to find the effect of Area level deprivation on the probability of having dental decay. Results: A total of 6964 individuals were examined and 1926(29.8%) had at least one active dental decay. In lowest IMD quintile 35.7%, 2nd quintile 33.1%, 3rd quintile 29.8%, 4th quintile 27.8% and highest quintile 24.5% of individual had at least one active decay. Multivariate logistic regression analysis result shows significantly higher odd ratios for having dental caries in higher IMD quintile than lower quintile after controlling age, gender, individual level socioeconomic status and marital status. The highest IMD quintile had a significantly high odds ratio of 1.7 (CI= 1.39,2.09) followed by 4th quintile 1.51 (CI= 1.23,1.84) and 3rd quintile 1.37 (CI= 1.12,1.67). However, 2nd quintile didn’t have significantly higher odds ratio than lowest quintile. Conclusion: People living in deprived areas in UK have higher chances of having dental caries than people living in more affluent areas after adjusting the effect of individual level socioeconomic status.