Systematic review: change in the quality of life of children and adolescents younger than 14 years old after oral health interventions: a systematic review.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study was to perform a systematic review that evaluated changes in the quality of life (QoL) of children and adolescents younger than 14 years old after oral health interventions.

METHODS

The search strategy was based on OVID, PubMed, VHL, Cochrane, and Google Scholar databases and was completed by a manual cross-reference search. The keywords used for the search were "child" and "oral health" and "quality of life"; for Google Scholar, "before and after treatment" were also used. Articles that met the inclusion criteria were classified considering methodological quality and risk of bias.

RESULTS

A total of 1,044 articles were initially retrieved; after excluding duplicate abstracts, 13 articles remained from the electronic search, and the manual search of their references detected 14 new articles. The exclusion criteria eliminated 16 of these 27 articles, leaving 11 for quality assessment. Of these, 2 were classified as high, 7 as moderate, and 2 as low methodological quality, and the majority of them had moderate risk of bias. Thus, our final selection was reduced to 9 articles for final analysis.

CONCLUSION

The level of evidence was moderate and detected changes in the impact on the quality of life of children and adolescents younger than 14 years old after interventions related to oral health.