Relationship between dental state and dietary intake in 70-year-old males and females in Göteborg, Sweden: a population study.

A representative sample of 368 70-year-old males and females in Göteborg, Sweden, participated in an odontological examination and a dietary interview. The aim of the study was to relate dental state to dietary habits and, furthermore, to study the possible influence of some social factors on these relations. The degree of dental invalidity was measured with Eichner's index. There was a highly significant correlation between this index and the number of teeth and tooth contacts. Dietary interviews were performed by a dietitian according to the dietary history method. Intake of several food items was significantly inversely related to the degree of dental invalidity in males but less so in females. The proportion of probands with insufficient intake of nutrients was in one or more respects higher among the edentulous than in the dentate and highest in the female edentulous probands with only one or no denture. Insufficient intakes of some nutrients were significantly related to the degree of dental invalidity. These relations remained unchanged in males but not in females when some socio-economic factors were introduced as confounding factors in a multivariate relation analysis; which might be due to the fact that these social factors play a more important role in females than in males.