CRP and mouth disorder: The dominant contribution of age observed here is consonant with 3 decades of global and Chinese evidence on oral-health burden, in which population ageing and lifelong oral-disease exposure concentrate severe tooth loss in older adults and reveal marked gradients by sex and socioeconomic position.34, 35, 36, 37 The positive association of baseline ln-CRP with incident edentulism aligns with the role of low-grade systemic inflammation in linking oral and systemic health.