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Boys had higher treatment needs and girls had both higher restorative treatment and extraction experience. Moreover, the subjective experience of illness is influenced by sociocultural factors; individuals are influenced by cultural norms of what to do when feeling pain or discomfort, how to express these feelings verbally and nonverbally, how and from whom to request assistance, and the expected roles and rules to behave as a sick person. Because of the low mortality and limited disability perceived to be caused by oral diseases, we may be witnessing a situation in which oral health problems are relegated to a secondary level of importance. A separate yet possibly overlapping situation is present when disease occurs and it is perceived as a need by the individual. Seeking care is conditioned by factors that often are beyond the control of individuals such as barriers to adequate access. Low coverage for oral health needs among adults in Mexico has been documented; because there are no special provisions for making clinical care easier to access in younger age groups, there is no evidence that the coverage problem may be any different for children and adolescents. Relatively few children and adolescents receive dental services.
Our findings suggested that the profiles of met and unmet treatment needs fitted predictable patterns, as they resembled features in which higher social disadvantage were more likely to have association with poorer outcomes in caries treatment. The results for the proposed TEI pointed in the same direction, and thus lend limited validation because of its resemblance to the trends in the TNI and CI. One factor to meeting health needs is being in fact able to use care services when needed. Social epidemiology has consistently studied health inequalities, that is, that people from better socioeconomic position have better levels of health; but the exact mechanism underlying this link is not well understood.