Association between Consumption of Carbonated Beverages and Dental Erosion – A Systematic Review

Abstract

Diet and nutritional factors affects oral health in multiple ways. Carbonated beverages have an inherent acidity due to the presence of carbonic acid, phosphoric acid and citric acid that are added to stimulate taste. Dental Erosion is an irreversible loss of dental hard tissues by a chemical process without bacterial involvement. The objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to evaluate the association of carbonated beverages with dental erosion. MEDLINE, Science Direct and Google Scholar were searched for articles published between January 2000 to March 2020. Observational studies reporting odds ratios for comparing the risk of dental erosion in patients reporting a frequent consumption of carbonated drink versus those with infrequent consumption were included for review. Studies not reporting odds ratio or with insufficient information to calculate odds ratio were excluded from the study. Newcastle-Ottawa scale was used to assess the quality of the studies. Pooled odds ratios and 95% confidence interval were calculated using a random-effect, generic inverse variance method. A total of 20978 participants from 21 cross sectional studies and 1 cohort study were included in the analysis. The pooled crude odds ratio (19 studies) was found out to be 1.44 (95% CI, 1.23–1.68) and pooled adjusted odd ratio (12 studies) was found out to be 1.86(95% CI, 1.42–2.42). Several clinical and methodological variation among the studies contributed to statistical heterogeneity (I2 = 69%, P ≤ 0.01 for crude odds ratio and I2 = 88%, P ≤ 0.01 for adjusted odds ratio). This systematic review study demonstrates statistically significant associations between consumption of carbonated beverages and dental erosion. Because of the high clinical and methodological heterogeneity estimated pooled effect cannot be relied upon.