We started off our investigation on dental health by analyzing data to find out how many people in the US are visiting the dentist. We also wanted to find if there were disparities in dental health for urban versus rural areas. We found data on the percentages of people who have visited the dentist in rural versus urban MSAs. A MSA is a metropolitan statistical area; the US census defines it as a county with a city that has a population of 50,000 or more. A graph of MSA regions can be seen in the figure below. It also includes micropolitan regions in lighter green. For our project we will not be considering micropolitan regions as urban.
The graphs below show the percentage of people in rural and urban areas who have visited the dentist every year from 1997-2019.
We can see a consistent rise from 1996 to 2020 in the percentage of children who visited dentists. This is good! But there are dips in some years, specifically 2001, 2006, 2014, and 2016. These match up with years for recession. The dips are much more significant for the outside MSA population which already shows an area of concern.
We can see the same trends happen in adults. A noticeable difference in adult data versus children is that there is a much bigger gap between the percentage of the population that visits the dentist in the outside MSA group. While the percentage of children and adults aged 65+ show a consistent increase over the years, the population aged 18-65 have not shown much of a change.
What are some possible reasons for the rural dental health disparity?
Age of Population in Rural vs Urban Areas
As we found previously, the largest group of concern in rural areas is the population age 65+. One possible reason is that there is a larger population of people 65+ in rural areas compared to urban. This could have skewed the sample size in the graphs above. The figure below confirms our suspicions, there are more people 65+ in rural versus urban areas.
This doesn’t completely explain the big picture though, and it especially does not explain why all populations had a decrease in percentage of people who visited the dentist.
Poverty Levels
The trends in age and percentage of population reporting barriers to dental care for the graphs above also correspond with the figures at the beginning of this article. That is, children had the least amount of barriers to dental care while adults and seniors had higher rates.
Another observation that can be made is that the states with fewer metropolitan statistical areas also have high rates of poverty.
Longer Travel Times in Rural Areas
If there are fewer dentists, people will have to travel longer distances to get access to dental care which can be extremely difficult in rural areas that already have fewer dentists. This can be seen by the figure below where rural areas have a smaller percentage of the population living within 15 minutes of a dentist. Not everyone can afford to take out a portion of their day to see the dentist.
