inequalities in an UK population. Community Dent Oral Epidemiol 2013; 41: 481–489. © 2013 The Authors. Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribu-tion License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract – Objectives:With health inequalities high on the policy agenda, this study measures oral health inequalities in the UK.Methods:We compare an objective clinical measure of oral health (number of natural teeth) with a self-reported measure of the impact of oral health (the Oral Health Impact Profile, OHIP) to establish whether the type of measure affects the scale of inequality measured. Gini coefficients and Concentration Indices (CIs) are calculated with subsequent decompositions using data from the 1998 UK Adult Dental Health Survey. Because the information on OHIP is only available on dentate individuals, analyses on the number of natural teeth are conducted for two samples – the entire sample and the sample with dentate individuals only, the latter to allow direct comparison with OHIP. Results:We find considerable overall pure oral health inequalities (number of teeth: Gini = 0.68 (including edentate), Gini = 0.40 (excluding edentate); OHIP: Gini = 0.33) and income-related inequalities for both measures (number of teeth: CI = 0.35 (including edentate), CI = 0.15 (excluding edentate); OHIP: CI = 0.03), and the CI is generally higher for the number of teeth than for OHIP. There are differences across age groups, with CI increasing with age for the number of teet