Caries and periodontal disease in cancer survivors.

data sourcesPubMed and EMBASE were searched for articles published between 1 January 1990 and 31 December 2008. STUDY SELECTION: Eligible studies were those that included dental caries and periodontal disease and pre-cancer dental clearance protocols in cancer patients undergoing head and neck radiotherapy, chemotherapy or combined treatment modalities. Rather than any study inclusion criteria this review had a number of exclusion criteria instead: systematic and non-systematic reviews; microbiology studies; growth and development studies; organ transplant studies; studies eliciting dental complications through questionnaires, studies reporting data from previous publications; phase I and II studies; opinion papers and case reports; articles published before 1990. All reports also had to be in English. DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS: Each article was reviewed by two authors independently with pilot-tested data collection forms. No quality assessment was pre-specified.

resultsSixty-four articles were included. Forty-six of these were observational (24 cohort, eight case control, 14 cross-sectional), and 18 were interventional studies. It is unclear how many participants this included. A weighted prevalence of caries was reported but it is unclear how the weighting was calculated. Overall the weighted prevalence was 28.1%. The overall DMFT for patients who were post-antineoplastic therapy was 9.19 (SD, 7.98; n=457). The overall plaque index for patients who were post-antineoplastic therapy was 1.38 (SD, 0.25; n=189).

conclusionsPatients who were post-radiotherapy had the highest DMFT compared to those who were post-chemotherapy and healthy controls.