Predictive modeling based on dental history with the LECA Score

Many clinical studies show a direct relationship between oral hygiene care and mortality rate. For example, studies show that gum disease increases the risk of cardiovascular disease by spreading harmful bacteria and infections directly to the blood. In susceptible individuals, this can trigger heart inflammation and conditions such as endocarditis. Heart diseases, like endocarditis, are one of the leading causes of death in the USA, with more than 630,000 deaths per year. These studies, usually performed on a small clinical population within a limited time period, were the initial trigger for Sikka to perform a survival analysis study on its big dataset for the possible mortality risk correlations with an individual’s dental procedure history.

Sikka's LECA Score has been validated in a 7+ million record study by a leading industry data provider. To calculate the LECA Score, Sikka performed an actuarial analysis on the type, frequency, and time-dependency of the dental procedures and mortality rates. For predictive modeling, the Cox Proportional Hazard Regression was used to estimate the covariance coefficients, confidence intervals, and their statistical significance on over 1,000 discretized attributes indicating the frequency of distinct procedure codes in each calendar year.