| |
Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
 | |
|
| Functional health and dental service use among older adults | | Author(s) | Teresa A Dolan, Chuck W Peek, Andreas E Stuck |
| Journal title | The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological sciences and medical sciences, vol 53A, no 6, November 1998 |
| Pages | pp M413-M418 |
| Keywords | Dental services ; Usage [services] ; Ill health ; Mobility ; Self care capacity ; Longitudinal surveys ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | Although socio-economic barriers to receiving adequate dental care have not been well documented, physical frailty as a risk factor for not visiting the dentist has not been fully explored. A series of discrete-time proportional hazards models is used in this US study, to examine the relationship between functional health and dental service use, taking into account sociodemographic characteristics, general and dental health status, and previous patterns of dental service usage. Data from a randomised trial of a comprehensive geriatric assessment and prevention programme for over 75s living in the community in Santa Monica, CA, collected between 1988 and 1993, were analysed. Functional status was negatively associated with dental service use, and the conditional probability of a first visit to the dentist after baseline decreased over time. When additional measures of general health, dental health, and socio-economic status were introduced, the effect of functional status was mitigated but remained significant. In the most fully specified model, which took dental visit behaviour prior to the beginning of the study into account, the effect of functional limitation remained significant. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-990302001 A |
| Classmark | L8: QLD: CH: C4: CA: 3J: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
|
| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
| |
|