Can dental treatments improve oral health-related quality of life? A systematic review

Oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) is a practically new but rapidly growing approach. The concept of OHRQoL can become a tool to explain and shape the state of clinical practice. This study was aimed to do a systematic review about the impacts of different dental treatments on OHRQoL. We searched the databases of PubMed, Google Scholar, Science Direct, Scopus, Cochrane, and Thomson Reuters Web of Science up to January 2018 with the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) keywords: “Intervention”, “Management”, “Improvement”, “Impact”, “Change” in combination with “Dentistry” AND “Oral health-related quality of life”. The reviewers screened the identified publications in three steps according to title, abstract, and full text; thereafter, they extracted all the related data in screened articles and finally classified it according to the field of dental treatment. Extracted data were saved in Excel software. Finally, 22 articles were enrolled in the review and based on the type of dental treatment were categorized into three groups: implant and prosthesis, oral surgery, and periodontics and aesthetic; overall, in 72.7% of the studies, improvement of OHRQoL was considered. The majority of used dental treatments have shown improvement of OHRQoL in studied patients.