Is there an association between oral hygiene and head and neck cancer?

Abstract

PubMed, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library and Embase were utilised as databases from inception till November 2021. The inclusion criteria consisted of cohort and case-control studies published in the English language, which dealt with diagnosed cases of head and neck cancer reporting survival, oral hygiene and comparative data. Studies pertaining to animal experiments along with case reports, conference proceedings, reviews, letters, editorials, errata and protocols were excluded. Data such as publication year, authors' names, country, sources, study groups, age, gender, participant number, education, alcohol, tobacco, study quality, cancer site and outcomes were extracted for each included study. A modified Newcastle-Ottawa Scale was utilized to evaluate the quality of these studies. A total of forty-four studies were included, of which forty were case-control and four were cohort in nature. These comprised of a total of 52,863 patients of which 33,000 were devoid of head and neck cancer (HNC) while, 19,863 had a confirmed diagnosis of HNC. Oral hygiene and HNC were found to be associated. Poor oral hygiene was concluded to be associated with HNC and the subsites thereof.