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Updated: May 31, 2026

Oral Health Assessment by Lay Personnel for Older Adults
Published on: February 2, 2020
Dental healthcare utilization and mortality: a population-based prospective cohort study in southern Sweden
Martin Lindström1, Aron Naimi-Akbar2, Emma Lindström3
1Social Medicine and Health Policy, Department of Clinical Sciences and Centre for Primary Health Care Research, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden. martin.lindstrom@med.lu.se.
Objective:
The aim was to investigate associations between dental healthcare utilization and all-cause, cardiovascular (CVD), cancer, and other-cause mortality.
Materials And Methods:
A postal public health survey was distributed in the autumn of 2008 to a stratified random sample of the population aged 18-80 in Scania, southern Sweden (response rate 54.1%). Baseline survey data were linked to mortality data, creating a prospective cohort study with 8.3-year follow-up. The present study entails 26,115 respondents. Associations between dental healthcare utilization and mortality were investigated in survival analyses and analyses with a nested case-control design.
Results:
In all, 68.4% had visited dental healthcare <1 year ago; 19.0%, 1-2 years ago; 6.7%, 3-5 years ago; 5.5%, >5 years ago; and 0.4%, never. The groups that had visited dental healthcare 1-2 years ago, 3-5 years ago, and >5 years ago displayed increased hazard ratios of all-cause mortality throughout the multiple- adjusted survival analyses compared to the <1-year reference group. Conditional logistic regression analyses with a nested case-control design confirmed results with a clearer gradient in all-cause mortality. CVD, cancer, and other-cause mortality showed some significant associations with dental healthcare utilization.
Conclusions:
Dental healthcare utilization was associated with all-cause mortality, with a clear gradient in the nested case-control design.
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