Relationship Between Child Maltreatment And Oral Health: A Systematic Review.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between maltreatment and oral health outcomes in children and adolescents, including cohort, case-control or cross-sectional studies.
Methods: The Pubmed / MEDLINE, Scopus, Cochrane, LILACS, Google Scholar, BBO, Scielo, Embase and Web of Science databases were used without year or language restriction.
Results: We identified 4783 studies. After reading the titles and abstracts, 29 were selected for analysis. Of these, 18 were included in the Systematic Review. It was possible to group data from four studies for meta-analysis. Sample sizes ranged from 63 to 1248 children. The selected studies had a cross-sectional design. Eleven were descriptive and evaluated caries and dental trauma. The 7 analytical studies evaluated only dental caries. Most studies on trauma have shown that more than 50% of maltreated children and adolescents (54% to 60%) had oral and maxillofacial injuries. In the descriptive studies, it was observed a higher chance of the researched population to present untreated dental caries. The meta-analysis summary estimate showed an association between child maltreatment and dental caries (RR = 1.78, 95% CI [1.58, 1.99]). This association was not significant when analyzing the absolute difference between decayed tooth means (MD = 2.27, 95% CI [-0.03, 4.58]).
Conclusions: Child victims of maltreatment had a higher occurrence of dental caries, greater need for treatment and a high frequency of trauma in the oral and maxillofacial region.