The findings demonstrate socioeconomic inequality in self-rated oral health and untreated dental caries among adults in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, yet they also highlight some important differences across countries. While New Zealand had the highest absolute inequality in measures of disease, the United States had the highest gaps in perceptions of oral health.
Measures of health status based solely on the objective assessment of pathological abnormality do not include non-biological aspects of health such as the mental and social wellbeing of individuals. We represented disease through normative clinical measures of untreated tooth decay and the magnitude or extent of the disease through the mean number of decayed teeth. To measure oral health, we used self-rated health, considered as “the most feasible, most inclusive and most informative measure of health status” [28].
Interestingly, our findings indicate that New Zealand had greater disease and wider socioeconomic gaps in the proportion and mean number of untreated decay than the other countries, despite having arguably the most comprehensive, wide ranging and free public dental service in the world, that is available to all aged below 18 years (through the School Dental Service). A possible explanation may lie in New Zealand not having a means-tested public dental service for low-income adults (those aged 18+ years), whereas such services are available in Canada, Australia and, to some extent, the United States.
Our study did not examine the effects of other contributing factors such as water fluoridation. It is estimated that 79% of the Australian population, 53% of the New Zealand population, 42% of Canadian population and 60% of the US population is supplied with artificially fluoridated water [29]. Water fluoridation has been regarded as the most effective way to reduce the prevalence and severity of caries, as well as socioeconomic disparities in its occurrence [30]. Although a side-effect of water fluoridation is mild fluorosis of enamel, manifesting a slightly more opaque enamel that is generally perceived by lay people as being aesthetically better, with concomitant effects on their self-rated oral health [31].
The United States had the most unfavorable indicators of oral health, in terms of self-ratings, which is in sharp contrast with self-ratings of general health, in which Americans perform relatively well [32]. In global health measures, the intrinsic value individuals assign to health is driven by a multitude of factors including socio-cultural environments and personal experiences [33].
Dissatisfaction with dental appearance is associated with tooth alignment and crowding, fractures in anterior teeth, and discrepancies in tooth shade [34,35,36]. It relates respectively to orthodontic treatment, aesthetic restorations and tooth bleaching [34, 35, 37]. Oro-facial aesthetics and appearance have been shown to be associated with self-ratings of oral health in diverse population samples [36, 38,39,40,41]. It is possible that the contemporary emphasis on dental aesthetics (such as tooth whitening) contributes to a general dissatisfaction in dental appearance and hence poorer self-rated oral health, whereas the same does not occur for general health.
Differences in reporting may arise from cultural perceptions of health, differences in health expectations and adaptability to ill-health, but also from the way in which the ordinal scale is understood by different individuals and how they weigh the different factors involved in the global measure [42, 43]. In this study, the wording of the SROH question varied slightly among the countries, with NSAOH and NHANES asking specifically about dental health/teeth, Canada framed the question in terms of health of the mouth and New Zealand asked for the health of both the teeth and mouth. Also noteworthy is that the United States asked about the ‘condition’ of the teeth, whereas all other countries framed the question around ‘health’, which could influence how the question is interpreted and may aid in explaining the large difference between the United States and the other countries. A limitation of the study was the inability to measure the extent to which the differences in terminology influenced the findings.
Differences in self-reports may be explained in terms of optimism, such as the ability among older people to adapt to slow declining health, and higher expectations when more socially advantaged groups, for example, report poorer health states [44]. Rousseau and colleagues [45] reported as such, arguing that the complete loss of all teeth is considered by middle-class people to be far more catastrophic than it is by working-class people, because of differing social norms. It is also possible that the frame of reference through which societies in a given country view disease differs; for example, Australians had the lowest levels of self-rated fair or poor health yet their levels of disease were as high as or higher than disease in the United States. Even subtle differences in subjective ratings point towards cultural, social and psychosocial influences on oral health [46]. Given the cultural and context-specific nature of self-rated health, our findings cannot necessarily be generalized to countries beyond those included in the analysis, and caution needs to be taken when making international comparisons [28, 33].
The study explored two socioeconomic indicators to draw a clear picture of social inequalities. Education has the potential to translate into employment opportunities, receptiveness to health messages and the ability to navigate health care systems, as well as representing values, beliefs, and attitudes. It captures the long-term effects of early life conditions and adult resources on health [47]. Income, which measures material resources and living standards, has a cumulative effect over the life course yet is dynamic in the short-term and may be prone to reverse causality if deteriorating health contributes to changes in income [47].
Whereas educational gradients in oral health and disease show some inconsistencies among countries, income shows consistently clear gradients across all countries. In terms of dental disease, this reflects the ability to access oral health care, favoring populations with higher income. In terms of perceived oral health, those with lower incomes reported lower self-ratings. If this general dissatisfaction were to lead to lower self-ratings than warranted by ‘objective’ health, and higher social groups were to systematically report better health than justified, such differences could lead to overestimates of health inequities [43]. Our study did not explore such possibilities at the individual level, but, on average, socially advantaged groups had better oral health, indicating that such overestimation is unlikely.
The limitations of the study were:
(1) there was no overlap of time period for all four surveys, although it is unlikely inequality estimates would differ systematically as major changes in chronic dental diseases are not expected within short time frames; and (2) Missing data for each survey could affect the findings; however, analyses of bias due to survey non-response was carried out independently, at least in the NSAOH, [21] indicating estimates are unlikely to be affected by systematic error. In addition we used weighted data to account for sampling probabilities and adjusted for age and gender.
An important next step is to compare socio-cultural and health system characteristics that shape disease and health status measures among different countries in order to have a better understanding of the roles these factors and other social determinants play in population oral health.
