Dental utilization for Medicaid‐enrolled children with cystic fibrosis

OBJECTIVES: Despite a multitude of risk factors, children with cystic fibrosis (CF) have lower reported dental caries prevalence. A potential explanation is preventive dental care use, but no studies to date have examined dental use for children with CF. METHODOLOGY: Iowa Medicaid data were analyzed for children age 3 to 17 years (N = 156,268). Poisson regression models were used to compare utilization rates for any dental care and also for specific categories of dental care, by CF status. RESULTS: Children with CF were significantly less likely to use any dental care than children without CF (incident rate ratio: 0.819, 95% CI: 0.80 to 0.84, p < .001). There were no significant differences in use across specific categories of dental care. CONCLUSIONS: Medicaid-enrolled children with CF are less likely to use dental care than children without CF. These findings suggest that use of dental care use is an unlikely explanation for lower purported caries rates among children with CF.