Dental healthcare utilisation among young adults who were in societal out-of-home care as children: A Swedish National Cohort Study

We used Swedish national registers to analyse dental health care among young adults with childhood experience of out-of-home care (OHC), in Cox regression analyses. All 1.7 million Swedish residents born in 1980-1994 were included, of whom 4% had been in OHC. The population was followed up in the Dental Health Register from age 20 to 29, during the period 2009-2014. We found that persons with short or long OHC experience made emergency dental care visits more often than their majority-population peers: 17-23% versus 9-10%, (adjusted Hazard ratios [HR:s] 1.60-2.02); they more often had tooth extractions, 9-12% versus 3% (HR:s 2.33-3.03); but less regularly visited a dentist for planned check-ups, 61-77% versus 80-87% (HR:s 0.76-0.78). Since dental health in young adulthood reflects dental health and dental care in childhood, the findings of this study call for improved preventive dental health care for children in OHC.