ArticleOral health & preventive dentistry2024
Utilization of Dental Care and Oral Health Outcomes in the United States: Results from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2017-2020).
Article in Oral health & preventive dentistry, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Oral health services use among adults in Brazil: inequities and the role of SUS in mitigating them (SB Brasil 2023).BMC oral health · 2026Article
- Oral health needs and use of services by adults: evidence from SB Brasil 2023.Brazilian oral research · 2025Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
purposeThis analysis aims to evaluate the association between the time since and reason for a patient's last dental appointment across clinical oral health outcomes. MATERIALS AND
methodsWe used data from the 2017-2020 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a cross-sectional, nationally-representative survey of noninstitutionalized US adults. The predictors were the time since and the reason for the last dental appointment (routine vs. urgent). We examined the presence and number of missing teeth and teeth with untreated coronal and root caries. Multivariable regression models with interaction were used to assess the association between the time since the last dental appointment and clinical oral health outcomes among routine and urgent users separately.
resultsTwo-thirds of the US population had a dental appointment within a year, while nearly 44 million individuals did not visit a dentist for the last three years. The odds of having teeth with untreated coronal or root caries increased with the length of time since the last appointment, and urgent users had worse dental outcomes compared to routine users. Compared to those who had a dental appointment within a year, individuals who had their last dental appointment more than 3 years ago had 2.94 times the average number of teeth with untreated caries among routine users (95%CI=2.39, 3.62) and 1.60 times the average among urgent users (95%CI=1.05, 2.43).
conclusionsRecent, routine dental appointments are associated with improved oral health outcomes. The outcomes reiterate how social determinants of health impact access to oral health care and oral health outcomes.
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