Special Health Care Needs
Divesh Sardana, MDS, MBA, MPH, PhD (he/him/his)
Clinical Assistant Professor
Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States
David Ciesla, DDS,MS
Oklahoma University
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States
Fernanda Pitta Ritto, DDS,MS, PhD
Faculty
Other
Oklahoma University
Nichols Hills, Oklahoma, United States
Timothy Fagan, DDS, MS
Clinical Professor and Division Head, Division of Pediatric Dentistry
Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States
Purpose: To exemplify, summarize and critically appraise the systematic reviews (SRs) that have evaluated different oral health education (OHE) interventions in individuals with visual impairment and compare the outcomes across the SRs.
Methods: Seven electronic databases were searched for SRs that have evaluated OHE programs in individuals with visual impairment. The risk of bias assessment of the included SRs was performed by two independent authors using the Assessing the Methodological Quality of Systematic Reviews-2 (AMSTAR-2) tool. The degree of overlap of the primary studies in the included SRs was performed by creating a citation matrix and calculating the ‘corrected covered area (CCA).’
Results: Seven SRs were included in this meta-evaluation that included 30 primary studies with a CCA of 26%, indicating a very high overlap. Most of the included SRs (n=6) were assessed to have critically low confidence in the results, whereas only one of them was evaluated to be of moderate confidence.
Conclusions: A combination of various OHE methods for the visually impaired might be better than using one method alone to improve oral hygiene, and no single method was observed to be superior to other methods. Furthermore, most of the oral health clinical research and program evaluations appear to come from limited parts of the world and data from most parts of the world is lacking. Thus, future studies in understudied countries could harness information from the available OHE programs to improve the oral health status of individuals with visual impairment.