• 11/9/2004
  • Elizabeth Querna
  • USNews.com

Straight, white teeth signify not only good physical health but also high social class. A nice set of choppers makes you look more employable, giving new meaning to the phrase putting your money where your mouth is. But for those segments of population without access to healthcare, bad teeth have economic and physical consequences. A policy report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Health Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. shows how the disparity in dental care hurts one group, African-American males.

What the researchers wanted to know:
How good is the dental health of African-American males, and what can be done to improve it?

What they did:
The authors pulled from numerous research studies showing differences in the dental care received by people of different races. Using studies published in the past decade, the authors examined dental care coverage, disease and tooth loss rates, percentage of black dentists, and dental visitations by African-American men.

What they found:
Fifty percent of black men have untreated dental decay as compared with 28 percent of white men; black men also have the highest rate of oral cancer of any demographic group, and the lowest survival rate. In Harlem, N.Y., 46 percent of African-American seniors were missing teeth, compared with 22 percent of Latinos. More than 9.5 billion African-American men, about 75 percent of the population, are without dental coverage, and are not usually eligible for Medicaid. Fewer than 25 percent of black men have visited a dentist in the past year and there is a shortage both of black dentists and dentists working in inner cities and rural areas.

What it means to you:
This report lays out a number of recommendations that could alleviate the disparity in dental health. It calls for increasing healthcare benefits to include black men currently uninsured, enticing more black dentists into the work force, and doing more research to illuminate the problem of African-American dental health. The problem goes beyond the borders of physical health into the economic situation of many African-Americans because good teeth affect both appearance and speech—both qualities that employers look at when hiring.

Caveats:
This is a policy study, and the authors had an agenda going into it, though their conclusions are based on scientific research. So, it has not been proven, at least by these authors, that the dental health problems of African-American men trump other segments of the population, or that this group is worse off than others (though it’s pretty safe to assume they’re near the bottom).