Functional oral health-related quality of life impact: A systematic review in populations with tooth loss

Patients perceive the impact of oral disorder in four major areas, the dimensions of oral health-related quality life (OHRQoL) Oral Function, Orofacial Pain, Orofacial Appearance, and Psychosocial Impact. The functional aspect is essential given the need of chewing, biting, speech and swallowing. The objective of this study was to identify OHRQoL information for dental subjects with functional oral health problems. In a systematic review, distinct and clinically relevant groups of dental subject samples, in this study called "population groups," with such functional OHRQoL information based on the Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP) were identified (PROSPERO registration: CRD42017064033). The search strategy was "Oral Health Impact Profile" or OHIP. Searches were conducted in the PubMed interface of the Medline database, EMBASE, Cochrane, CINAHL and PsyINFO on 8 June 2017 and updated on 14 January 2019. Published OHIP domain data of different versions were recalculated into OHIP-14`s Physical Disability domain score, characterising the subject's Oral Function impact. 3,653 potentially abstracts were screened. We identified 78 publications reporting dimensional information on 154 subject samples with 52 populations. A typical mean functional impact for partially dentate subjects was 1.6 units on a 0 to 8 unit metric, while for edentate subjects, the mean functional impact was 2.6 units. The functional impact score ranged from 0 to 7.9 units with 50% of the patient samples located between 0.8 and 2.6 units. For the first time, we provide normalised and therefore comparable metric information about the functional OHRQoL impact for a substantial number of functional oral conditions.