Dental service use among adults with incident type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis or inflammatory bowel disease

It is not clear if or how the incidence of systemic conditions like type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM₂), rheumatoid arthritis (RA) or inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) affects dental service utilization. Using nationwide Danish register data, the aim of this study was to analyse the use of dental services 7 years before and after being diagnosed with DM₂, RA or IBD between 1997 and 2011.

Information about incident DM₂ was obtained from the Register for Selected Chronic Diseases and Severe Mental Disorders, and incident RA and IBD were defined based on diagnosis codes of hospital contacts identified through the National Patient Register. Separately, for each of the three conditions, each individual with the incident condition was matched to one control individual based on age, gender, country of origin, municipality of residence, highest completed education, the main source of income and income using coarsened exact matching in the year of incidence. The use of dental services and treatments received within each calendar year from 7 years before to 7 years after getting the condition were analysed with generalized estimating equations.

People with incident DM₂ were less likely (by seven percentage points) to be dental service users within a year than people without incident DM₂ for a period extending from up to 7 years prior to 7 years after the diagnosis. This difference even slightly increased after the diagnosis. Those with incident IBD exhibited a consistently but modestly higher proportion of dental service use (three percentage points) than those without incident IBD before and after the diagnosis. Differences in the use of services between those with or without incident RA were minor. For all three systemic diseases, detected differences mainly mirrored differences in the provision of supragingival scaling and restorative treatment.

The findings suggest that the impact of these three systemic conditions on dental service use was minor.