Predictive modeling based on dental history

Correlation between oral health & mortality

Literature review shows that correlations exist between oral health and mortality. For example, heart diseases are one of the leading causes of death in the USA with about 630,000 deaths per year. Overall, many clinical studies show a direct relationship between oral hygiene care and mortality rate. Studies showed that gum diseases increases the risk of cardiovascular disease because the gum diseases spread harmful bacterias and infections directly to blood, and when they reach a susceptible heart, they can cause inflammation that causes Endocarditis.

These studies are usually performed on a small clinical population within a limited time period. Nonetheless, these studies were the initial trigger for Sikka to perform a survival analysis study on its big dataset for the possible mortality risk correlations with the individual’s dental procedures history. An actuarial analysis is performed on the type, frequency, and the time-dependency of the dental procedures and mortality rates. For predictive modeling, the Cox Proportional Hazard Regression was used to estimate the covariance coefficients, confidence intervals, and their statistical significance on over 1,000 discretized attributes indicating the frequency of distinct procedure codes in each calendar year.