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The oral health of patients with severe mental illness is poor, in general, and this may be attributed, in part, to inadequate dental care. This study investigated dental care utilization among patients with severe mental illness using a national representative sample.

This study used Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Dataset for 2009. Patients with the diagnosis of severe mental illness (ICD-9-CM: 290–298) were recruited as the study sample, and others comprised the control. Any visit to a dentist was defined as positive in terms of dental care utilization. Regression analyses were applied to determine the odds of dental care utilization for each diagnostic entity of severe mental illness, compared with the general population and controlling for potential covariates.

Only 40 % of 19,609 …