Passive smoking encourages tooth decay

Infants exposed to secondhand tobacco smoke when they are four months old may be twice as likely to develop dental caries at three years of age as unexposed children, Japanese research suggests.

The study enrolled 76,920 children at four months of age, 55.3% of whom lived in a household with at least one smoker. About one in 15 (6.8%) children lived in a household in which family members smoked in front of the infant. The authors defined this as ‘exposure’.

At three years of age, 14% of children who did not have a smoker in the family (controls) had developed dental caries. This compares to 20% of children who came from a smoking household, but were not ‘exposed’ to tobacco smoke, and 27.6% of ‘exposed’ children.