Addressing Oral Health Disparities...
How the School of Dentistry's Detroit Dental Health Project is Making a Difference in the Lives of Children and their Caregivers
"The problem is even bigger and much deeper than we envisioned when we began our work."
That’s the assessment of Dr. Amid Ismail as he discussed the results of an ambitious Detroit oral health community research program he heads that began in the fall of 2001.
This 3-year-old is representative of thousands of youngsters in his age group who were seen by community researchers investigating the reasons for oral health disparities in Detroit.
Funded with a $9.25 million grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, Ismail’s team is documenting the extent of oral health disparities among low-income African-Americans in Detroit and is using the findings to develop approaches designed to eliminate those differences.
Those efforts are a follow-up to a major finding of the U.S. Surgeon General’s report on oral health, issued in May 2000, which identified “a silent epidemic” of dental and oral diseases that disproportionately affect the nation’s poor, especially children.
A professor at the School of Dentistry and the School of Public Health, Ismail is the director of the Detroit Dental Health Project.
The Detroit Dental Health Project is one of five research centers in the U.S. to receive funding from NIDCR, the nation’s leading supporter of research on oral, dental, and craniofacial health, to conduct the disparities study.
Initially known as the Detroit Center for Research on Oral Health Disparities, Ismail said the name was changed to the Detroit Dental Health Project “because our mission is more than research. We’re also trying to empower families and give them important information they need about oral health that will allow them to make a major difference in the lives of their children.”
DDHP is a collaborate effort that includes various U-M schools and colleges, other academic institutions in Michigan, the Detroit Department of Health, and numerous community organizations. View participating organizations.
Major Findings
“We know there are oral health disparities,” said William Ridella, deputy director of the Detroit Health Department. “But Dr. Ismail and the Detroit Dental Health Project made all of us even more aware of just how extensive the problem is in this community because they quantified their findings.”
Some of the major ones, according to Ismail, include:
- Caries is a major problem and children get them much earlier than thought. More than one-third of children in the city have significant caries by age 3. The figure rises to more than 50 percent by age 5.
- Many parents or caregivers consider caries an “inevitable” part of childhood that they can do little or nothing about.
- Much of a child’s diet consists of eating too many processed foods and drinking too many sugary beverages. An abundance of convenience stores and lack of traditional food stores that sell highly nutritious foods with fiber and vitamins amplify the caries problem.
- Many children whose parents or caregivers receive Medicaid do not visit a dentist on a routine basis (every six months).
- A broad-based approach is needed to solve the oral health disparities problem.
“Our research shows that solving these problems will require a comprehensive approach and that these efforts must be conducted at a grass roots level in Detroit involving just about everyone,” Ismail said. “This can’t be done piecemeal. And it can’t be done from Ann Arbor. If we want to resolve oral health disparities among children, there has to be active engagement among community organizations and city departments, parents or caregivers, health providers, and others.”
