Oral Health Problems among Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders in the United States

Abstract

Children with neurodevelopmental disabilities (NDD) suffer poor oral health problems (OHP) leading to adverse health outcomes. We examined the association between NDD and OHP among children in the United States (US) ages 3-17 years using data from the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) 2016-17. The prevalence of OHP was 19.1%. Children with NDD had about 40% greater likelihood of poor oral health compared to their non-NDD counterparts (p <0.0001). Living at or above 200%-300% of the federal poverty level (FPL), private insurance coverage, and living with a least a college educated adult were found to be protective factors against poor oral health among children. Key words: • Neurodevelopmental disorder • Oral health problems • Children • United States Copyright © 2020 Yusuf et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.