Maternal Stress Affects Children’s Oral Health

Maternal Stress Affects Children’s Oral Health

Take a bite of this: mom’s stress can make her child more prone to early childhood caries. This according to the study “Maternal Allostatic Load, Caretaking Behaviors, and Child Dental Caries Experience: A Cross-Sectional Evaluation of Linked Mother–Child Data From the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey,” published in the November issue of the American Journal of Public Health, in which two researchers evaluated the association between chronic stress, maternal caretaking behaviors, and childhood caries incidence.

Study authors Erin E. Masterson, MPH, of the Schools of Public Health and Dentistry at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Wael Sabbah, BDS, DDPH, PhD, of the Dental Institute at King’s College London, analyzed data on early childhood caries, maternal stress, caretaking behaviors, and socioeconomic status among children age 2 to 6 from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They discovered that children of mothers with higher stress levels were more likely to develop caries and to not have been breastfed, demonstrating that stress plays an important role in caretaking behaviors and oral health.

Hygiene Connection E-Newsletter

October 2015