Abstract
PurposeOral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) is the most important patient-reported outcome measure in oral health research. The purpose of the present research was to study the association of family socioeconomic position (SEP) with children’s OHRQoL.MethodsThis cross-sectional study was embedded in the Generation R Study, a population-based cohort study conducted in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. For the present study, OHRQoL was assessed of 3871 ten-year old children. Family SEP was assessed with the following indicators: maternal/paternal education level, maternal/paternal employment status, household income, benefit dependency, and family composition. Linear regression analyses were performed to evaluate the (independent) associations of family SEP indicators with OHRQoL.ResultsThe median (90% range) OHRQoL score of the participating children was relatively high [50.0 (43.0–53.0)]; however, OHRQoL was consistently lower in children with low family SEP. Positive associations were found for all SEP indicators (p-values <0.05) except maternal employment status and family composition. Benefit dependency, paternal employment, and household income were the most strongly associated with OHRQoL. No family SEP indicator was significantly associated with OHRQoL independent of the other indicators.ConclusionsBased on the present findings, interventions and policies promoting good oral health and oral well-being should target children from low socioeconomic position. More research is needed, however, to understand the pathways of social inequalities in children’s OHRQoL especially for the effects of material resources on subjective oral health measures.
Highlights
Oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) is a commonly used patient-reported outcome measures in dental research
The nonresponse analysis showed that children without information on OHRQoL had more often parents from a lower socioeconomic status
Our results suggest that clinical variables, such as caries and malocclusions, are associated with lower OHRQoL, and different socioeconomic and environmental variables interfere significantly in children’s conditions of daily life
Summary
Oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) is a commonly used patient-reported outcome measures in dental research. This measure is designed to assess the impact of oral diseases from the patient perspective and is . Quality of life measures in medical and dental research become increasingly important because of the patients’ more active participation in their health treatment, because of the need for new evidence in oral health practices, and because more and more diseases cannot be cured by the treatment they improve the patient’s condition [1, 2]. In line with the Wilson and Cleary model, these inequalities have been shown in subjective oral health measures among adolescents, adults, and the elderly [10,11,12,13]. The evidence for the relation between family socioeconomic position (SEP) and OHRQoL in the preschool-aged and the school-aged children is inconclusive [13, 14]
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