New research from Statistics Canada examining the association between Canadians’ missing teeth, mortality and their incidents of hospitalization, finds that missing teeth are “significantly associated” with an increased risk of all-cause, circulatory and respiratory hospitalizations. After adjusting for age and other risk factors, however, no significant relationship was found between missing teeth and mortality.
Although researchers hypothesized that missing teeth may serve as a non-invasive marker for overall health and mortality, their findings indicated that missing teeth were associated with elevated all-cause and cancer mortality in unadjusted models, but not after covariate adjustment. (Each additional tooth was associated with an approximately 16 per cent increase in all-cause mortality and cancer mortality between 20- to 70-year-old study participants but the findings lost statistical significance after adjusting for socioeconomic variables and risk factors.)
Hospitalization data, meanwhile, tells a different story: “After adjusting for key risk factors, including age and sex, participants with five or more missing teeth had a 76 per cent higher risk of all-cause hospitalization and a 120 per cent higher risk of circulatory-related hospitalization,” they write. “No significant links were found with hospitalizations for digestive diseases or cancer.”
They say the positive association between missing teeth and hospitalizations from respiratory system disease was also observed, an association they describe as being robust across various sensitivity analyses.
