[xoxoxoBruce]

My colleague Robert Allison finds the most interesting data sets to visualize! Yesterday he posted a visualization of toothless seniors in the US. More precisely, he created graphs that show the estimated prevalence of adults (65 years or older) who have had all their natural teeth extracted. The dental profession calls these people edentulous. According to the CDC, about 20% of seniors (more than 35 million Americans) are edentulous.

When I looked at his sorted bar chart, I noticed that the states that had the most toothless seniors seemed to be poorer states such as West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In contrast, richer states such as Colorado, Connecticut, and Hawaii had a relatively small number of toothless seniors. I wondered whether there was a correlation between median income in a state and the number of edentulous individuals.

Rob always publishes his SAS programs, so I used his data and merged it with the state median household income (2-year-average medians) as reported by the US Census Bureau. Then I used the SGPLOT procedure to plot the incidence of toothlessness (with lower and upper confidence intervals) versus the median state incomes. I also added a loess curve as a visual smoother to the data, as follows:

link
Makes sense to me that lower income people, due to diet and ability to pay for timely repair/maintenance, would have a larger percentage of edentulous codgers.