What is new in the 2020 International Association of Dental Traumatology emergency treatment guidelines?

Abstract

Over the past eight years, there have been marked changes in the recommendations for the management of traumatic dental injuries (TDIs). The recently published International Association of Dental Traumatology (IADT) guidelines for the emergency management of TDIs provide a comprehensive manual for clinicians to refer when assessing and managing patients presenting with these types of injuries. Clinicians should be prepared to utilize these new guidelines which were released in 2020. The aim of this short communication is to support those with previous knowledge regarding the IADT guidelines, to identify the changes in treatment modality, and to provide backing for those exposed to trauma guidelines for the first time. In the present communication, the areas of TDIs have been separated into primary and permanent teeth plus avulsions, with a tabular format highlighting the main changes in the emergency management from the previous version in 2012. This format has been devised to aid the clinicians' understanding of the variations over time and facilitate recall of the new guidelines. For the first time, the 2020 IADT Guidelines present a Core Outcomes Set (COS) that includes outcomes that were relevant to all TDIs and outcomes related to only one or several TDIs. However, the COS is not the object of the present publication.