| Preventive dental visits are intended to monitor oral health and to prevent disease before it occurs. If early caries lesions are detected, these can be reversed and controlled in a timely way. This study is a cross sectional study to investigate factors associated with children's (age 18 and younger) use of diagnostic and preventive dental services.; In this study two files of 1998 MEPS data were used: household components full-year data file, and household component dental event data file. Four models of dental utilization were used following the model proposed by Andersen and Newman (1973). Univariate analysis, bivariate analysis, and logistic regression were used to describe the data and to investigate the association between factors and outcome variables.; The study found that increase in the likelihood of having a dental visit was associated with having health insurance, an increase in the child's mother's education, and an increase in the child's annual household income; and children whose mothers have at lease one preventive dental visit during the year in which the study was conducted are more likely to have a diagnostic and preventive dental visit in the same year. The study was not able to demonstrate the effect of the child's health status on his/her diagnostic and preventive dental visits.; Additionally, in this study the dependent variable diagnostic and preventive visit was compared with three conditions: having no visits, having other types of visit, and having orthodontic types of visits. These changes in conditions have altered the effect of some of the predictor variables on the outcome variable.; Finally, the study was affected by the lack of a variable for dental insurance coverage, in addition to limitations related to the data itself such as social desirability, underreporting, and the retrospective nature. |
