Oral health and well-being: Insights from personal narratives of losing teeth and living with dentures

Objectives

To explore how individuals who have lost or have missing teeth and subsequently received dentures make sense of the factors influencing their oral health and well-being.

Methods

Thematic and structural narrative analysis was used to evaluate 19 semi-structured interview transcripts from a secondary dataset of United Kingdom adults (10 males and 9 females, aged 22–86 years) living with dentures.

Results

When participants shared their denture experiences, they integrated their oral health challenges into the broader context of their daily lives. Four themes emerged: socioeconomic inequality, masking oral functioning, accepting vulnerability, and fear of social judgement. Analysing these themes demonstrated cyclical and complex links between oral health and sense of well-being (both hedonic and eudaimonic), with socioeconomic position and limited resources moderating these links. Structural inequality, emotional mediators, social and cultural context, plus personal background shaped how individuals perceive and respond to their oral health challenges.

Conclusion

The study reveals the multifaceted and dynamic links between oral health and well-being by employing a case-centred narrative analysis of the underlying mechanisms. The narratives confirm the Oral Health Related Quality of Life (OHRQoL) framework and add depth by demonstrating how the impacts extend to eudaimonic domains such as autonomy, personal growth and self-acceptance. This highlights the individualised meaning of oral health conditions within one's life narrative. These findings suggest the integration of eudaimonic well-being domains into existing OHRQoL frameworks for a comprehensive understanding of oral health experience.