Is there evidence for the impact of poor oral health on school performance?

As part of our study, we reviewed the report published in BMC-Oral Health, titled “An assessment of the impacts of child oral health in Indonesia and associations with self-esteem, school performance and perceived employability” by Maharani et.al, 2017. We noted a plausible error in the interpretation of results in the report and re-examined the published data. Contradictory to the published report, our analysis showed no evidence for the relationship between toothache and poor school performance. Significant relationship was only found between plaque accumulation and school performance. We argued that the error may have originated from an unclear objective and misclassification of school performance variable before applying statistical test to address the objective of this study.