9% of California kids have never seen a dentist

PALO ALTO, California – Nine percent of children ages 2 to 11 in 2013-14 had never had a dental visit, according to data from the California Health Interview Survey.

The Length of Time Since Last Dental Visit for kids in California survey comes on the heels of the Little Hoover Commission’s scathing report on Denti-Cal, the dental health care program for 13 million low-income Californians.

Counties with the highest percent of young children who had never visited a dentist were San Joaquin County at 28 percent, Shasta County at 19 percent and Fresno County at 18 percent.

In over 12 additional counties, at least 10 percent of children hadn’t visited a dentist, including Santa Clara County, Sacramento County and Los Angeles County.

Tooth decay is the most common chronic disease among children ages 6 to 18. Untreated dental problems, such as cavities and gum disease, can affect a child’s health and quality of life by causing pain, nutritional and sleep problems, impaired concentration and increased school absences, as well as lost work hours for parents.

If dental disease is not treated early, it can result in more serious and expensive intervention later on.

Tooth decay and other oral diseases disproportionately affect low-income children, children of color, and uninsured children. For this reason, the federal government has set a public health goal focused on improving access to preventive dental services for low-income children.

The federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes dental health care for children in the essential health benefits that must be covered by all qualified health insurance plans, a major step forward in ensuring access to oral health care for children.

According to experts, policy options that could influence children’s dental health include: increasing reimbursement rates for dental providers under public insurance programs; creating incentives for them to treat low-income children; increasing the number of pediatric dentists where Medi-Cal patients live; setting pediatric dental benefits under ACA at affordable rates to allow low-income families to access the services; reinstating state support for children’s dental disease prevention; and ensuring that all communities have fluoridated drinking water, as evidence suggests that it reduces cavities among children.

source: globalnation.inquirer.net

Kids get more cavities when they live with smokers, says Japan study

Young children are much more likely to get cavities if they live in a household with smokers, a Japanese study suggests.

Compared to children in non-smoking households, kids living with smokers were more than twice as likely to have cavities at age three.

Even when smokers in the home didn’t light up near the children, these three-year-olds were 50 percent more likely to have cavities than kids who didn’t live with smokers, the study found.

The findings should give parents another reason to quit smoking, and another way for health care providers to talk to them about cessation, said senior author Koji Kawakami, a researcher at Kyoto University in Japan.

“Education on the harm of secondhand smoke might increase if dentists became aware of the risk of [cavities] as well as tobacco consumption of their clients,” Kawakami said by email.

To understand the connection between secondhand smoke and cavities, Kawakami and colleagues examined data on almost 77,000 children born between 2004 and 2010 in Kobe City, Japan.

To be included in the study, children needed data on household smoking status when they were infants, as well as records from dental exams done at 18 months and three years.

Overall, about 55 percent of the children lived in households with smokers, but only about 7 percent had people who smoked around them instead of lighting up somewhere away from the kids.

By age three, 14 percent of the kids in non-smoking households had cavities, compared with 20 percent of children who had smokers in the home who tried not to use cigarettes in their presence, and 28 percent of kids who were directly exposed to the smoke.

Children of women who smoked during pregnancy didn’t appear to have an increased risk for cavities, the authors reported in the medical journal BMJ.

One limitation of the study is that it relied on mothers to honestly report smoking in the home on questionnaires, the authors acknowledge. In particular, women may have underreported smoking during pregnancy.

In addition, because the study was observational, and didn’t randomly assign groups of children to live with or without smokers, the findings can’t prove that smoke exposure causes cavities.

Two things in Japan—lack of fluoride in the water and less sugar in a typical diet—might make results for these children different than what researchers might see in the US and other countries, where children consume more sweets and have fluoride-enhanced drinking water, the authors also note.

But the connection between cigarette exposure and cavities is strong enough that the US Surgeon General has warned that secondhand smoke may be associated with an increased risk of tooth decay in children.

“This study simply adds to the body of evidence that associates secondhand smoke and an increased risk of tooth decay among children,” said Jonathan Shenkin, a researcher in pediatric dentistry at Boston University and a spokesperson for the American Dental Association.

“Tooth decay is the most common chronic disease in childhood,” Shenkin, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email. For parents, “knowing they can protect their children against pain and suffering will hopefully be a strong motivator to quit smoking.” — Reuters -