The Burden and Projections for 2036 of Periodontal Diseases in Asia From 1990 to 2021

Periodontal disease is one of the most common oral diseases in the world and a significant public health challenge. Asia is the region with the highest number of cases. This study comprehensively analyzed the current situation and trends of periodontal diseases in Asia from 1990 to 2021, providing detailed insights into periodontal diseases in the region.

The study employed the open data from the Global Burden of Disease 2021 Database to explore the characteristics of periodontal disease burden in Asia from 1990 to 2021, including the prevalence rate, incidence rate, and changes in disability-adjusted life years. A descriptive analysis of the burden of periodontal diseases in Asia was conducted from multiple dimensions, such as age, gender, and country. The autoregressive integrated moving average model was used to evaluate the trend from 2022 to 2036. Additionally, the Xtreme Gradient Boosting algorithm was used in conjunction with SHapley Additive Explanations for feature importance analysis and model interpretation.

In 2021, there were approximately 684,742,467 patients with periodontal diseases in Asia. South Asia had the highest age-standardized prevalence rate and age-standardized disability-adjusted life years rate (ASDR), while Central Asia had the highest age-standardized incidence rate. The high-income Asia Pacific region exhibited the lowest age-standardized prevalence rate, age-standardized incidence rate, and ASDR. The age group with the highest number of patients was 50 to 54 years old, and the disease was more common in men. The Socio-Demographic Index was negatively correlated with periodontal diseases. The results of SHapley Additive Explanations analyses demonstrate that age is the most influential factor in predicting periodontal disease. Autoregressive integrated moving average model projections suggest that these indicators will remain stable through 2035, indicating that the overall burden of periodontal disease in Asia is expected to plateau rather than continue to rise.

The burden of periodontal diseases varies significantly across Asian regions. Therefore, future policy-making should fully consider differences among countries in disease epidemiological characteristics, medical resource distribution, and sociocultural backgrounds, and formulate targeted strategies to effectively reduce the burden of periodontal disease.