A systematic search was carried out using key words such as “Climate change”, “Climate changes”, “Climate control”, “Climate controls”, “change, climate”, “changes, climate” “Oral Health”, “Dental Health”, “Dental Care”, “Oral Diseases”, “Dentistry”, “Dental Professionals” in PubMed, Embase, and Scopus databases. Boolean operators were also used to combine the searches and elaborate the search strategy. We did not apply any restriction of time frame or language to the articles.
Eligibility Criteria: All the papers that assessed the relationship/impact of climate change and oral health without any restriction of time frame/ language/ study design were included in this study. Papers that reported on the impact of oral health/dentistry on climate change or those assessing the impact of climate change on anything apart from oral health and dentistry were excluded from the study.
Screening Process: A systematic approach for study selection was carried out to screen the articles for eligibility and evaluate the titles and abstracts. We manually removed the duplicates, and the full-text articles were subsequently selected for analyzing data. The discrepancies arising during this stage were resolved by the third author. The inter-rater reliability across the title/abstract and full text review stages was assessed using Cohen’s Kappa and found to be 0.89 and 0.86, respectively. The data extracted from the included articles is presented in Table 1. Details regarding the primary author, year of publication, title, type of paper, and summary/recommendation were reported.
Summary of findings
Literature search
The databases PubMed (195), Embase (278), Scopus (10), and additional sources (10) initially led to the identification of 493 records. 45 records were initially removed as they were found to be duplicates. 428 records that did not meet the inclusion criteria were excluded after screening the titles and abstracts. 20 papers remained, of which ten papers either reported the relationship of oral health/dentistry on climate change or included the impact of climate change only as a very small part of the report and were excluded, and thus finally 10 papers were included in the final analysis (Fig. 1) [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14].
Flowchart of records screening.
Study characteristics
The characteristics of the included study have been presented in Table 1. The papers included in this review were carried out between 2010 and 2024. Of the included papers, the primary authors of five papers were from India, one from England, one from the United States of America, and the remaining from Pakistan, Canada, and Kenya, each. With regards to the type of papers, four papers were review papers; including a scoping review; three were letters to editor (Editorial), and two were commentary/comments, while the remaining one was qualitative.
The role of poor air quality, food/water insecurity, extreme weather events, vector-borne illnesses, and social factors on oral health has been reported in a number of papers. Findings from multiple papers have revealed the importance of health education and preventive programs in addressing the challenges imposed by climate change.
The findings from different papers have reported direct/indirect associations of climate change with oral diseases and conditions such as dental caries, dental erosion, and oral cancer; developmental defects of enamel; early childhood caries; periodontal disease; dental trauma; skeletal and dental fluorosis. The association of these diseases highlights the gravity of the potential impact of climate change on oral health and dental diseases. Additionally, studies have also highlighted the negative impact of climate change on health service provision, warns that resources may become scarce due to extreme weather events causing supply and transport problems, which may cause costs in dentistry to rise.
link