Prosthetic status and Treatment need in Indian population:A Systematic Review

Abstract

Introduction To examine the prevalence of partial or complete edentulousness in different geographic areas of the Indian population. Materials and Methods An electronic search in PubMed/Medline, Cochrane Library, ScienceDirect, Wiley Online Library, and Google Scholar was conducted to find relevant papers that had been written in English exclusively and published before May 2022. Based on the PICO, the primary research question for this study was ‘What are the prosthetic status and treatment needs of the adult population in India?’ By evaluating the title, abstract, and full text of the articles, if they met the inclusion criteria, the relevance of the articles was verified. The quality of the included studies was assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) tool for analytical cross-sectional studies. Result The database search yielded 278 items, of which 123 were discarded due to being irrelevant, duplicates, or lacking data. The remaining 155 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility 20 articles were yielded by manual search and 9 articles were added through a search of a reference list of relevant articles. A total of 151 full-text papers were evaluated for eligibility, with 5 articles being excluded. The current systematic review includes a total of 35 studies. Conclusion The current systematic review states the prevalence of complete edentulousness is comparatively less than partial edentulism, ranging between 0.8% to 14%, except for the tribal population where it is around 42-43%. On the other hand, figures depicting partial edentulism are between 15 to 98% distributed in the different geographical regions. The prosthetic status reported in the studies involved ranges between 3% to 100% with a mean of approximately 35%. Prosthetic treatment need reported overall was between 14% to 100%, in which requirement was found to be more in the maxilla in maximum of the studies included while only a few studies predicted more treatment need in the mandible. The requirement and correlation with gender cannot be established as the figures vary in all the studies included. This research establishes a baseline reference and highlights the lack of attention given to oral health. Key Words: Geographic areas, Population, Prosthetic treatment