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Prevalence of malocclusion in Chinese schoolchildren from 1991 to 2018: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Min Lin1,2, Congman Xie1,3, Hongmei Yang2,3
1College of Stomatology, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China.
Background:
Malocclusion is a common oral health problem in schoolchildren. Literature describing the prevalence of malocclusion varies substantially across China.
Aim:
This study identified the epidemiological characteristics of malocclusion among Chinese schoolchildren from 1991 to 2018.
Design:
Six English and Chinese electronic databases were searched through November 2018. The search was supplemented by hand searching to identify relevant surveys. The overall prevalence of malocclusion was estimated by a random-effects meta-analysis model, and variations in different groups were assessed by subgroup meta-analysis.
Results:
Thirty-seven eligible articles describing 117 682 samples were investigated. The pooled national prevalence for malocclusion was 47.92% (95% CI: 58.6%-71.9%). For the Angle classification, the overall prevalence rates were 30.07% (95% CI: 25.37%-35.48%), 9.91% (95% CI: 7.41%-13.79%), and 4.76% (95% CI: 3.85%-6.54%) for Class I, Class II, and Class III malocclusion, respectively. A deep overbite (16.67%, 95% CI: 11.50%-23.08%) was shown to be the most common trait of malocclusion. When stratified by sex, males had a slightly higher prevalence than females (RR = 1.04, 95% CI: 1.01-1.06). More importantly, an ascending trend and substantial variations across the country were observed.
Conclusions:
Our results confirmed that malocclusion has become a serious oral health problem in Chinese schoolchildren, highlighting the need for proactive interventions at an early age. Moreover, high-quality epidemiological studies on malocclusion are still required.
