Social Support and Functional Dentition Among English Older Adults

Objectives: The aim of this study was to examine the association between social support and functional dentition among older adults in England. Methods: A cross-sectional analysis was conducted using data from Wave 7 (2014/15) of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). Functional dentition, defined as having 20 or more natural teeth was the outcome. Positive and negative social support scores were included as exposures. Smoking and socioeconomic factors were included as covariates. Poisson regression models with robust variance estimators were used to estimate prevalence ratios (PRs) for functional dentition, adjusting sequentially for demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioural factors. Results: A total of 6457 participants were included. Most participants in the sample were female, white, had less than O-Level education, were in higher wealth groups, had never smoked, and reported having functional dentition. The majority reported higher levels of positive social support and lower levels of negative social support. In the fully adjusted Poisson model, each one-point increase in positive social support score was associated with a 1% higher prevalence of functional dentiti