Global Burden and Inequality of Dental Caries, 1990 to 2019
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous studies on the global burden of caries primarily focused on simple descriptive statistics. We aimed to characterize the burden, trends, and inequalities of untreated caries of permanent and deciduous teeth from 1990 to 2019 at the global, regional, and national levels through an array of analytic approaches. Estimates of caries burden were extracted from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. Decomposition analysis was performed to examine the contribution of demographic and epidemiologic factors to the evolving number of prevalent caries cases. In portfolio analysis, the caries epidemiologic profile of each country was categorized by terciles of age-standardized prevalence in 2019 and average annual percentage change from 1990 to 2019. Sociodemographic attribution analysis was performed to reveal the scale of inequality in burden of caries. Age-standardized prevalence of caries in permanent and deciduous teeth decreased 3.6% (95% uncertainty interval, 2.6% to 4.5%) and 3.0% (1.3% to 4.9%), respectively. Population growth was the key driver of the changes in the number of caries cases, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (percentage contribution: 126.6%, permanent teeth; 103.0%, deciduous teeth). Caries prevalence in the permanent dentition was lower in more developed countries, whereas a reverse trend was noted in the deciduous dentition, except for the highest sociodemographic quintile where caries prevalence was the lowest. Globally, 64.6 million (95% CI, 64.4 to 64.9 million) and 62.9 million (62.8 to 63.1 million) prevalent cases of caries in permanent and deciduous teeth were attributable to sociodemographic inequality in 2019. This amounted to 3.2% (3.2% to 3.2%) and 12.1% (12.1% to 12.1%) of the global number of prevalent cases of caries in permanent and deciduous teeth. Burden of dental caries remains a global public health challenge. A systemwide reform of the global oral health care system is needed to tackle the causes of the burden and inequality of dental caries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".