| I think the idea that people have in terrible teeth in the UK is a bit outdated, but did you look carefully at the study? The ‘better teeth’ you report is 7 missing teeth on average in the uk vs 7.3 in the US. Both of those numbers seem high to me: you’d need to have all wisdom teeth plus three more removed for example. It made me wonder whether that average was biased by old people[1] with many missing teeth[2], who I think aren’t that relevant to the idea about teeth being bad in one country rather than another. For the ‘oral health impacts’ measure, which corresponds to a questionnaire, OHIP-14[3], with questions like ‘have you been self-conscious because of your teeth, mouth or dentures?’ The score for the UK is lower than the US here, though I guess the measure is less objective and you can imagine cultural factors would impact the answers (eg maybe people from one country would downplay things more, or if worse teeth are more socially acceptable in the country, people there may be less likely to be embarrassed about their teeth. I think the kind of ‘bad teeth’ more common in the U.K. is crookedness (eg overlapping incisors or over/underbite) and teeth being more yellow. The paper notes that they weren’t able to measure things like that. My general impression is that bad teeth in the US (on someone who grew up there) are a pretty strong signal that someone grew up poor, and this is a little less the case for the UK. [1] the paper claims these are ‘age-standardised’ numbers. I don’t really know what that means but I guess that it means the number is mostly meaningful for comparing the countries rather than what people in those countries are like. For ages 25–44, they report averages of 3.7(UK) vs 4.6, which still looks a bit high to me. There’s about five times the rate of toothless mess in the US for that age group which made me think there might be some small population in the US with many missing teeth that isn’t so large in the UK, but the paper found the same income-based inequality in number of missing teeth [2] The paper claims to have gotten similar results when excluding the toothless [3] Slade GD; Derivation and validation of a short-fortn oral health impact profile. Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology 1997; 25; 284-90. |