Negative synergy of mental disorders and oral diseases versus general health

In recent years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has undertaken wide-ranging epidemiological research with the purpose of discovering and confirming correlations between mental disorders and somatic diseases. Despite strong evidence for the existence of a two-way dependence between psychological disorders and general diseases, interest in studying the similar impact of oral health is still low. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the multidirectional dependencies between mental, oral and somatic health, and the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to each psychiatric patient. The PubMed, MEDLINE, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases were searched for articles published between 1994 and 2018 which involved studies examining the interdependencies between oral, general and mental health, using the following keywords: "comorbidities", "common mental disorders", "mental health", "oral health", "depression", "periodontitis", and "WHO". This review highlights the fact that there is still limited discussion on the importance of the impact of oral health on the general health of psychiatric patients. Data gathered in this paper suggests that an oral examination of mentally ill patients should be considered mandatory.