Impact of early childhood caries on oral health-related quality of life: review

Abstract

The oral health problems affecting children have received special attention in both contemporary and epidemiology dentistry. Dental caries can cause many problems for children at an early age. These problems include esthetics, physical, social, psychological, and functional activities that all affect the general health of the children. Thus, early childhood caries (ECC) can compromise the children’s quality of life. This review aimed to declare the impact of ECC on the oral health-related quality of life. A Medline research was completed for the period from 1990 to 2019, along with a manual research, to locate relevant peer-reviewed articles and textbooks published in English. Several keywords were used to obtain all possible articles concerned with the subject. Thus, it was concluded that there is a scarcity in studies that were conducted to study the impact of ECC on oral health-related quality of life, also most of them were trials and showed unclear results. It is recommended to establish more studies which focus on declaring the children’s oral health-related quality of life in the presence of ECC.