Evidence from the literature has shown that people with a
lower socioeconomic status enjoy less good health than
people with a higher socioeconomic status. The Italian deprivation
index (DI) was used with the aim to evaluate the
association between the DMFT index and risk factors for dental
caries, including city population and DI. The study included
4,305 12-year-old children living in 38 cities classified by
demographic size as small, midsize and large. Zero-inflated
negative binomial multilevel regression models were used
to assess risk factors for DMFT and to address excess of zero
DMFT and overdispersion through a Bayesian approach. The
difference in the average level of DMFT among children living
in cities with different DI quintile was not statistically significant
(p = 0.578). The DI and ln(population), included as
city-level fixed effects in the two-level variance components
model, were not statistically significant. Consuming sweet
drinks on average increased the mean DMFT of a susceptible
child, while having a highly educated mother reduced it. Un-observed heterogeneity among cities was detected for the
probability to be non-susceptible to caries (city-level variance
= 0.26 with 95% credibility interval 0.09–0.57), while no
territorial effect was found for the mean DMFT of the susceptible
children. Our results suggest that the DI and city population
did not play a role in explaining between-city variability.
Interventions against social deprivation can be influential
on the perception of oral health in Italian 12-year-old
children to the extent that they can also affect individual
level factors
