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Does regional socioeconomic context affect the dental caries experience? A multilevel study of Korean adults
Author(s) -
Choi YounHee,
Lee Sang Gyu
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
european journal of oral sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.802
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1600-0722
pISSN - 0909-8836
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0722.2011.00831.x
Subject(s) - affect (linguistics) , socioeconomic status , context (archaeology) , multilevel model , dentistry , medicine , multilevel modelling , environmental health , psychology , geography , population , communication , archaeology , machine learning , computer science
Choi Y‐H, Lee SG. Does regional socioeconomic context affect the dental caries experience? A multilevel study of Korean adults.
Eur J Oral Sci 2011; 119: 294–300. © 2011 Eur J Oral Sci Recent thinking about the role of regional socioeconomic context in generating health inequalities has argued for the collection of true ‘area’ data that accurately reflect the characteristics of a region. We investigated whether a range of attributes of regional environments, constructed from factor analysis of various regional socioeconomic indices, is associated with the dental caries experience of adults, and whether the nature of this association changes according to age. A linked data set comprising information on 6,402 individuals from the Korean National Oral Health Survey of 2000 and regional information from 118 districts where our study population lived, were examined using multilevel analysis. The regional contextual variables, ‘density of service and medical facilities’ and ‘dependence on manufacturing industry’, were negatively associated with dental caries experience after controlling for individual characteristics, and these associations differed by age groups, especially in the older age group. Our findings suggest that hypotheses about specific chains of causation which might link service affluence or industrialization with dental caries need to be investigated further using more detailed indices.