Dental News - Country’s political system influences population’s DMF index

Dental Tribune International

Mon. 6. August 2018

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LONDON, UK: At the 96th General Session and Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research, recently held in London, researchers presented their findings of a study investigating whether prolonged exposure to a given political system affected the decayed, missing or filled (DMF) teeth index in various countries, according to the political typologies of social democratic, conservative, liberal and dictatorial regimes.

Analysing data from 62 countries, the study showed that countries categorised as social democratic and liberal had better results in decreasing the DMF index than did conservative and especially dictatorial regimes. For social democratic countries, a decrease of 65.72 per cent and for liberals 53.97 per cent was reported, while conservative countries showed a decrease of 37.62 per cent, and an increase of 14.53 per cent was recorded for dictatorial regimes.

The epidemiological study was based on secondary data from the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, the World Bank and various websites on countries that met the inclusion criteria. A country’s assignment to a political typology was determined by the political orientation of its ruling party.

The study findings, titled “Does a country’s political regime influence its DMTF index”, were presented during a poster session by Dr John Estrada Montoya from the National University of Colombia in Bogotá.

The researchers noted, however, that the typology they used did not adapt well for developing nations’ politics. They thus recommended the creation of new interdisciplinary typologies better suited to the political realities of such countries in order to further characterise and study the relationship between political regimes and oral healthcare indicators.

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