This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Tobacco  • Occupational and Environmental Medicine  • Dentistry/ Oral Medicine  • Pediatrics  • Pediatrics, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In Reply: Dr Davies suggests that passive smoking may simply be a marker for poor oral hygiene or other dietary risk factors. However, formation of caries in the primary teeth is a poorly understood phenomenon, and it cannot be exclusively blamed on known risk factors, such as poor oral hygiene and diet control.^1-3 Some previous studies have found an association with high sugar intake while others have not. Of those that found a link, none controlled for passive smoking. We did control for sucrose intake and found no significant association in the bivariate analysis, so there was no reason to include this factor in the multivariable analysis. For passive smoking to be simply a marker for poor tooth brushing or high sugar intake, one would have to imagine that after controlling for income, education, race, region of residence, and even frequency of visits to the dentist, that smokers of all . . . [Full Text of this Article]

RELATED ARTICLE

Passive Smoking and Dental Caries in Children
Michael Davies
JAMA. 2003;289(22):2940.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT