Center to Address Disparities in Children's Oral Health

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A Center Addressing Disparities in Children's Oral Health is proposed at the University of California, San Francisco, with two primary institutional partners serving minority populations, the San Francisco Department of Public Health and the San Ysidro Community Health Center, a model health center located near the US-Mexican border, and additional collaborating institutions. The theme for this Center is to understand, prevent, and reduce oral health disparities among young children, with a primary focus on preventing early childhood caries. A secondary theme is to understand the interactions between the oral health and medical delivery systems that can affect children's oral health. These goals will be pursued from two primary directions: retrospective data- based projects to increase our understanding of the etiology of oral health disparities and to identify children most susceptible, and intervention projects to prevent disease. In this center we will 1) Support primarily patient and population-oriented research related to reducing oral health disparities in children; 2) Establish core facilities to provide technical services and resources to Center-affiliated projects; 3) Provide an enriched environment for training future health-care professionals and scientists, especially those from under-represented groups; 4) Establish mechanisms to increase collaboration among investigators in Center- supported projects, across health professions and affiliated collaborating public and private institutions on the west coast. Findings from this project will 1) identify cultural, environmental, workforce, behavioral, and biologic factors associated with health disparities among the ethnic/racial groups in the very diverse California environment; 2) enhance our ability to target children likely to be at risk for dental caries; 3) provide successful interdisciplinary interventions to prevent disease and reduce oral health disparities.