Prevalence of Traumatic Dental Injuries in Epileptic Patients - A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

An increase in dental trauma due to seizures in epileptic patients is a serious concern. Other serious injuries are treated immediately, but dental trauma goes ignored. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to know the proportion of dental injuries and their subgroups.

We searched PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, and Google Scholar from January 1, 1990, to April 30, 2023, to identify articles reporting dental trauma due to epilepsy. We used two measures of heterogeneity (Q and I2-statistic) to select appropriate model (fixed or random effect model) for estimating pooled proportion. We used meta-regression to identify the significant predictors affecting the proportion of interest.

We included 28 articles in the final meta-analysis. The pooled proportion (prop) of dental trauma in epilepsy patients was 0.20 (95% CI 0.16 to 0.25). The categories for subgroup meta-analysis were hard tissue dental injury (prop: 0.14 (0.09, 0.20)), soft tissue dental injury (prop: 0.25 (0.18, 0.32)), both groups (prop: 0.48 (0.39, 0.57)), injury to teeth (prop: 0.14 (0.09, 0.20)), injury to tongue (prop: 0.28 (0.18, 0.37)), injury to lip (prop: 0.17 (0.10, 0.25)). gum injury (prop: 0.09 (0.05, 0.16)), injury to cheek (Prop: 0.12 (0.06, 0.18)), others (Prop: 0.61 (0.46, 0.75)), Negroid group (prop: 0.15 (0.08, 0.21)), Caucasian group (prop: 0.20 (0.12, 0.28)), and Asian group (prop: 0.24 (0.16, 0.32)).

The proportion of traumatic dental injuries due in patients with epilepsy was 0.20. Oral soft tissues were more affected than hard tissues (prop: 0.25 vs 0.14), and among soft tissues, tongue was most affected (prop: 0.28). Early age of epilepsy onset and high frequency of seizures also contribute to dental trauma.