Oral health situation of Chilean preschool children in the years 2007-2015: systematic review and analysis at individual level.

Abstract

Introduction: Oral diseases are a worldwide public health problem in need of constant evaluation and follow-up. Aim: To analyze Chilean preschoolers’ oral health indicators by age, sex, socioeconomic status and urban/rural location of their school. Material and Methods: Systematic review conducted in PubMed, EMBASE, Scielo and gray literature to identify oral health epidemiological studies in Chile. We included studies with regional representativeness, published until May 2021. We requested the studies’ datasets (individual data) and conducted a reanalysis for six oral health indicators: prevalence of untreated caries, caries experience, gingivitis, malocclusions and dmft/DMFT. Sex, age, urban/rural location of their school and socioeconomic status (SES) were considered as exposure variables. We assessed the risk of bias in each study and synthesized the oral health results for each of them. Differences between each indicator and explanatory variables were analyzed through Fisher’s exact test. Adjusted prevalence ratios were estimated through Poisson regression. Results: We selected nine studies and had access to five individual-level study datasets. Differences were observed in caries and gingivitis according to age, SES and rurality in most of the studies, observing highest differences for low SES in 2009 (PR caries experience = 2.68; PR untreated caries = 2.90). No differences were observed for SES nor rurality for malocclusions. Conclusion: A reduction of indicators was not observed over the years. SES has remained as a social determinant of oral health in preschoolers in Chile.