According to recent studies nearly 20 million Americans annually visit a dentist but not a general healthcare provider, according to an NYU study published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study, conducted by a nursing-dental research team at NYU, is the first of its kind to determine the proportion of Americans who are seen annually by a dentist but not by a general healthcare provider.

This finding suggests dentists can play a crucial role as health care practitioners in the front-line defense of identifying systemic disease which would otherwise go undetected in a significant portion of the population, say the researchers.