Access to dental care reduces the risk of tooth loss in older subjects

Background: The significance of access to dental care on oral conditions in older subjects is limited. We hypothesized that dental care control for aging effects on oral and periodontal conditions. Materials and methods: 1020 randomly selected subjects between age 60 and 96 from the Swedish National Study on Aging and Care Blekinge study received comprehensive medical and dental examinations. Results: Dentate women and men had, on average,18.4 teeth (S.D. ± 7.6), and 18.9 teeth (S.D.±7.5) (P = 0.37) respectively. In the youngest age group with infrequent dental visits 37% had > 20 teeth, and 73% had > 20 teeth if they had annual visits. Among old-old infrequent dental visitors 1.8% had > 20 teeth and 37% had > 20 teeth with annual visits. Across age groups, the overall % bleeding on probing was 23%. When adjusting for age, GLM univariate analysis failed to demonstrate an effect of frequency of dental visits and ABL scores (P = 0.18) but frequent dental visitors had significantly more teeth than infrequent visitors (P = 0.001). Conclusions: Tooth loss and extent of alveolar bone loss increase with age. Frequent dental visits seem to preserve teeth but has no impact on the amounts of deposits, gingival inflammation, or alveolar bone levels.