You are here

Article Text

Article menu
XML
Epidemiology
Research
A national cross-sectional study on effects of fluoride-safe water supply on the prevalence of fluorosis in China
  1. Cheng Wang1,
  2. Yanhui Gao1,
  3. Wei Wang1,
  4. Lijun Zhao1,
  5. Wei Zhang1,
  6. Hepeng Han1,
  7. Yuxia Shi1,
  8. Guangqian Yu1,
  9. Dianjun Sun1
  1. 1Center for Endemic Disease Control, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Harbin Medical University; Key Lab of Etiology and Epidemiology, Education Bureau of Hei Long Jiang Province & Ministry of Health (23618104), Harbin 150081, China
  1. Correspondence to Prof Dianjun Sun; hrbmusdj{at}163.com

Abstract

Objective To assess the effects of provided fluoride-safe drinking-water for the prevention and control of endemic fluorosis in China.

Design A national cross-sectional study in China.

Setting In 1985, randomly selected villages in 27 provinces (or cities and municipalities) in 5 geographic areas all over China.

Participants Involved 81 786 children aged from 8 to 12 and 594 698 adults aged over 16.

Main outcome measure The prevalence of dental fluorosis and clinical skeletal fluorosis, the fluoride concentrations in the drinking-water in study villages and in the urine of subjects.

Results The study showed that in the villages where the drinking-water fluoride concentrations were higher than the government standard of 1.2 mg/l, but no fluoride-safe drinking-water supply scheme was provided (FNB areas), the prevalence rate and index of dental fluorosis in children, and prevalence rate of clinical skeletal fluorosis in adults were all significantly higher than those in the historical endemic fluorosis villages after the fluoride-safe drinking-water were provided (FSB areas). Additionally, the prevalence rate of dental fluorosis as well as clinical skeletal fluorosis, and the concentration of fluoride in urine were found increased with the increase of fluoride concentration in drinking-water, with significant positive correlations in the FNB areas. While, the prevalence rate of dental fluorosis and clinical skeletal fluorosis in different age groups and their degrees of prevalence were significantly lower in the FSB areas than those in the FNB areas.

Conclusions The provision of fluoride-safe drinking-water supply schemes had significant effects on the prevention and control of dental fluorosis and skeletal fluorosis. The study also indicated that the dental and skeletal fluorosis is still prevailing in the high-fluoride drinking-water areas in China.

  • Epidemiology
  • Public Health
  • Fluorosis

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2012-001564

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Supplementary materials

    • Supplementary Data

      This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.

      Files in this Data Supplement: