Research Finds Link Between Fertility and Tooth Loss

Having a larger family is linked to a heightened tooth loss risk for mums, suggest the results of a large European study published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health

The popular saying: ‘gain a child, lose a tooth’ suggests that fertility may be linked to tooth loss, but there are no hard data to back this up.

To try and plug this gap, the researchers drew on data from Wave 5 of the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).

SHARE contains information on the health, educational attainment, and household income of more than 120,000 adults aged 50+ from 27 European countries plus Israel.

Wave 5 was conducted in 2013, and included questions on the full reproductive history and number of natural teeth of 34,843 survey respondents from Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and Israel.

The average age of the respondents in Wave 5 was 67, and they reported an average of 10 missing teeth — normally adults have 28 plus 4 wisdom teeth in their mouth.

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