- Title
- Income and wealth as correlates of socioeconomic disparity in dentist visits among adults aged 20 years and over in the United States, 2011-2014
- Creator
- Kailembo, Alexander; Quiñonez, Carlos; Lopez Mitnik, Gabriela V.; Weintraub, Jane A.; Stewart Williams, Jennifer; Preet, Raman; Iafolla, Timothy; Dye, Bruce A.
- Relation
- BMC Oral Health Vol. 18, Issue 1, no. 147
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12903-018-0613-4
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Background: Most studies in the United States (US) have used income and education as socioeconomic indicators but there is limited information on other indicators, such as wealth. We aimed to assess how two socioeconomic status measures, income and wealth, compare as correlates of socioeconomic disparity in dentist visits among adults in the US. Methods: Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2011-2014 were used to calculate self-reported dental visit prevalence for adults aged 20 years and over living in the US. Prevalence ratios using Poisson regressions were conducted separately with income and wealth as independent variables. The dependent variable was not having a dentist visit in the past 12 months. Covariates included sociodemographic factors and untreated dental caries. Parsimonious models, including only statistically significant (p < 0.05) covariates, were derived. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) measured the relative statistical quality of the income and wealth models. Analyses were additionally stratified by race/ethnicity in response to statistically significant interactions. Results: The prevalence of not having a dentist visit in the past 12 months among adults aged 20 years and over was 39%. Prevalence was highest in the poorest (58%) and lowest wealth (57%) groups. In the parsimonious models, adults in the poorest and lowest wealth groups were close to twice as likely to not have a dentist visit (RR 1.69; 95%CI: 1.51-1.90) and (RR 1.68; 95%CI: 1.52-1.85) respectively. In the income model the risk of not having a dentist visit were 16% higher in the age group 20-44 years compared with the 65+ year age group (RR 1.16; 95%CI: 1.04-1.30) but age was not statistically significant in the wealth model. The AIC scores were lower (better) for the income model. After stratifying by race/ethnicity, age remained a significant indicator for dentist visits for non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and Asians whereas age was not associated with dentist visits in the wealth model. Conclusions: Income and wealth are both indicators of socioeconomic disparities in dentist visits in the US, but both do not have the same impact in some populations in the US.
- Subject
- disparities; inequalities; socioeconomic position; income; wealth; dental utilization; dental visits; Sustainable Development Goals; SDG 10
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1402575
- Identifier
- uon:35047
- Identifier
- ISSN:1472-6831
- Rights
- © The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities
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