In the ongoing exploration of climate change’s impacts, a comprehensive review has shed light on its potential effects on oral health. Researchers conducted an extensive search using terms like “Climate change,” “Oral Health,” and “Dental Care” across major databases such as PubMed, Embase, and Scopus. The search strategy was expanded using Boolean operators, ensuring a thorough examination of available literature without constraints on time or language.
Eligibility Criteria: The scope of this study was limited to works assessing climate change’s impact on oral health, excluding studies that focused on how oral health affects climate change or those that did not primarily address oral health and dentistry.
Screening Process: The screening involved a meticulous review of titles and abstracts to determine eligibility. Duplicates were manually removed, and full-text articles were evaluated for data analysis. Any discrepancies during this process were resolved by a third author, with Cohen’s Kappa indicating high inter-rater reliability (0.89 for titles/abstracts and 0.86 for full texts). The extracted data is detailed in Table 1, which includes information on authorship, publication year, and study summaries.
Summary of findings
Literature search
The initial search across PubMed (195), Embase (278), Scopus (10), and other sources (10) yielded 493 records. After removing 45 duplicates, 428 records were excluded for not meeting the criteria, leaving 20 papers. Of these, 10 papers were excluded for not focusing on climate change’s impact on oral health, resulting in 10 studies for the final analysis (Fig. 1) [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14].
Flowchart of records screening.
Study characteristics
Table 1 outlines the study characteristics. The studies, spanning from 2010 to 2024, were authored by professionals from India, the UK, the USA, Pakistan, Canada, and Kenya. The compilation includes four review papers, three editorials, two commentaries, and a qualitative study.
Various studies within the review pointed to the effects of environmental factors such as air quality, food and water security, and extreme weather on oral health. These papers emphasized the role of education and preventive programs in mitigating the challenges posed by climate change.
Research has shown connections between climate change and oral health issues like dental caries, erosion, oral cancer, periodontal disease, and fluorosis. The studies also caution about potential disruptions in health services due to extreme weather, which could lead to increased costs and resource scarcity in dental care.
Original Story at www.nature.com