InquiryOral health and dementia
Section snippets
Background
Older persons have more oral health problems than younger persons. In addition, orofacial pain is believed to increase with age. A particular group that appears to have an even higher prevalence of oral health problems consists of older people with dementia. As their cognitive function declines, motor skills and self-care decline, increasing the risk for oral health disruption. A systematic overview of the oral health and orofacial pain experienced by older persons with and without dementia was
Methods
The PubMed, CINAHL, and Cochrane Library databases were searched for relevant studies, yielding 527 articles, of which 37 were included. Quality assessment was determined using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS). Eleven studies were cohort studies, 6 were case-control studies, 19 were cross-sectional studies, and 1 was a randomized controlled trial (RCT). A total of 3770 participants with dementia and 4036 without dementia were included, mean age 78.18 and 74.0 years, respectively.
Results
The studies used various means to classify participants as having or not having dementia. The severity of decline in cognitive status was also evaluated using various instruments in the different studies. The outcome measures used for dental hard tissue status included number of teeth present, decayed-missing-filled teeth (DMFT) index, number of retained roots, and number of teeth with coronal and root caries. Caries presence and severity were determined as crude caries increment (CCI), root
Discussion
In this first systematic review of oral health variables in older patients with and without dementia, many oral health indicators were minimally different between the two groups. Coronal caries and root caries were found significantly more often in older persons with dementia than in those who were cognitively intact, which is likely the result of the cognitive, medical, and functional changes that occur with dementia. Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease cause several conditions in the human body
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Delwel S, Binnekade TT, Perez RSGM, et al: Oral health and orofacial pain in older people with dementia: A systematic review with focus on dental hard tissues. Clin Oral Invest 21:17-32, 2017
Reprints available from S Delwel, Faculty of Behavioral and Movement Sciences, Dept of Clinical Neuropsychology, VU Univ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; e-mail: [email protected]