NEW YORK: Researchers at New York University, Duke University and Fudan University have recently found that older people who are socially isolated are more likely to have missing teeth than those with more social interaction.
Loneliness and social isolation among older people have been major public health concerns worldwide and are risk factors for mental health disorders, cardiac disease, cognitive decline, and early death.
Xiang Qi, the lead author of the research, and colleagues studied the relationship between social isolation, loneliness, and tooth loss in the aged population of China. They used the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey to analyse data from 4,268 adults aged 65 and up.
The researchers found that higher levels of social isolation were associated with having few teeth and losing teeth more quickly with time, even when controlling for other factors such as oral hygiene, health status, drinking, smoking and loneliness.
Older adults who were socially isolated had, on average, 2.1 fewer natural teeth and 1.4 times the rate of losing their teeth than those with more vital social interaction.
The researchers also came to the point that socially isolated older adults tend to be less engaged in social and health-promoting behaviours like physical activity, which could negatively impact their overall functioning and oral hygiene and increase their risk for systemic inflammation. This functional impairment seems a major pathway linking social isolation to tooth loss. However, loneliness was not associated with the number of remaining teeth, nor with the rate of tooth loss.
The research titled, 'Social isolation, loneliness and accelerated tooth loss among Chinese older adults: A longitudinal study' has recently been published in Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology.