BMC Oral Health (May 2025)

Link between fertility behavior and edentulous jaw in middle-aged Chinese women: a cross-sectional study from the CHARLS

  • Ruijie Wang,
  • Weichen Deng,
  • Yuting Li,
  • Xue Du,
  • Jianglin Sun,
  • Yi Luo,
  • Jukun Song,
  • Siyang Luo

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12903-025-06132-w
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 25, no. 1
pp. 1 – 13

Abstract

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Abstract Background Women’s health is a critical topic in global public health. Female fertility, an important stage in a woman’s life, is closely tied to overall health. Currently, there is a lack of research exploring the relationship between oral health and female fertility. Method The data for this study came from 10,475 female participants in the 2018 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). The dependent variable was the edentulous jaw. Logistic regression analysis, threshold effect analysis, and restricted cubic splines (RCS) were used to examine the relationship between reproductive history—including age at first childbirth and parity—and edentulous jaw in Chinese women. Results A total of 19,816 people were available for analysis. After exclusion, 5662 women with fertility data and edentulous jaw data were included in the analysis. In the sample of this study, the average age is 61.9 ± 10.3 years old, 17.5% have dentition loss, and 33.3% were younger than 21 years old when they gave birth to their first child (21 is the early childbearing age set in consideration of the current fertility situation in China, which happens to be the first quartile of the age of first birth of our sample), with an average of 2.7 ± 1.5 children. Logistic regression showed that the high incidence of edentulous jaws was related to early childbearing (AOR: 1.386, 95% CI: 1.126–1.710), and it was also related to parity (AOR: 1.106, 95% CI: 1.036–1.181). The results of threshold effect analysis show that when the age of the first birth is below the threshold of 25.898 and the parity is below the threshold of 3.329, its influence on the dependent variables may change significantly. Conclusion The prevalence of edentulous jaw height in these women in the middle age groups is related to early childbearing and parity, indicating that conscious control of childbearing age and parity could effectively reduce the probability of edentulous jaw in women's later years.

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