Oral Health and Tobacco Use
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- Using smokeless tobacco and smoking are risk behaviors for oral cancer, dental caries, periodontal disease, and other oral conditions.1
- Dental visits represent an opportunity to identify individuals who smoke and help them quit smoking, yet dental settings remain an untapped venue for treatment of tobacco dependence. 2
- Dental school clinical faculty would benefit from in-service training and hands-on tobacco-treatment practice to gain knowledge about and confidence in modeling important communication skills to students. This training should include information on tobacco-use assessment and how to help patients quit, including those who are not ready to quit, using brief motivational counseling. 3
- Training oral health professionals is essential to enable them to implement guidelines and provide effective interventions to help patients quit smoking. 4
- When taking health histories, oral health professionals should ask about all forms of tobacco, including cigars, cigarettes, e-cigarettes, chewing tobacco, snus, and other forms of smokeless tobacco. 5
- Behavioral counseling interventions, such as face-to-face or phone interaction with a health professional, print materials, and computer applications, can reduce the risk for smoking initiation among school-age children and adolescents. 6
- Tobacco quitlines are underused by oral health professionals and should include oral health care settings in their educational outreach to increase adoption of these evidence-based services. 2
- Since 2010, the proportion of 12th grade students who used marijuana during the preceding 30 days (21.4 percent) has surpassed the proportion who used cigarettes (19.2 percent). 7
- Increased exclusive marijuana among high school students, as well as increased use of marijuana among high school students who smoke cigarettes or cigars, could undermine success in reducing tobacco use in this population. 7
- Closer collaboration between public health professionals to address prevention of tobacco and marijuana use might be beneficial in the development of evidence-based policies and programs to prevent tobacco and marijuana use among high school students. 7
- Wiener RC. 2013. Association of smokeless tobacco use and smoking in adolescents in the United States: An analysis of data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey, 2011. Journal of the American Dental Association 144(8):930–938.
- Wiener RC. 2015. Children, sealants, and guardians who smoke: Trends in NHANES 2001–2002 to 2010–2012. Dental, Oral and Craniofacial Research 1(1):3–9.
- Jannat-Khah DP, McNeely J, Pereyra MR, Parish C, Pollack HA, Ostroff J, Metsch L, Shelley DR. 2014. Dentists’ self-perceived role in offering tobacco cessation services: Results from a nationally representative survey, United States, 2010–2011. Preventing Chronic Disease. 11:E196.
- Davis JM, Arnett MR, Loewen J, Romito L, Gordon SC. 2016. Tobacco dependence education: A survey of US and Canadian dental schools. Journal of the American Dental Association 147(6):405–412.
- Omaña-Cepeda C, Jané-Salas E, Estrugo-Develsa A, Chimenos-Küstner E, López-López J. 2016. Effectiveness of dentist’s intervention in smoking cessation: A review. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Dentistry 8(1):e78–e83.
- Tomar SL, Fox CH, Connolly GN. 2015. Electronic cigarettes: The tobacco industry’s latest threat to oral health? Journal of the American Dental Association 146(9):651–653.
- Moyer VA. 2103. Primary care interventions to prevent tobacco use in children and adolescents: U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation statement. Pediatrics 132(3):560–565.
- Rolle IV, Kennedy SM, Israel A, Everett Jones S, Bunnell R, Caraballo R, Xu X, Schauer G, McAfee T. 2015. Cigarette, cigar, and marijuana use among high school students—United States, 1997–2013. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) 64(40);1136–1141.
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