[Drug information in recent 5 volumes of the Year Book of Dentistry]

The Year Book of Dentistry appears annually, providing a review of dental articles. We surveyed the abstracts of the recent 5 volumes of the Year Book of Dentistry, from 1985 to 1989. Two hundred and eighty articles were abstracted in each volume, divided into about 13 categories. The proportion of abstracts concerned with drugs and drug therapies (here termed drug information) was almost 20% in all volumes. Most of the drug information appeared under the heading "Oral Medicine and Oral Pathology" (63%). The original articles for the abstracts were from many journals, but 70% of the drug information articles were from JADA, Oral Surgery, and 10 other journals. The classification of the drugs in the drug information were: drugs for dental treatment, antibacterials, antiinflammatories, hemostatics, anesthetics, and others. Oral manifestations of systemic diseases or side effects of drugs used for these diseases were also abstracted. There were numerous articles of systemic diseases, due to dental treatments, including infective, hematologic diseases.