How far have we come? A historic scoping review of dental traumatology literature

Abstract

The status of the protocols used for the management of dental trauma (DT) in the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century is largely unknown. The end of World War II saw a tremendous resurgence of high quality research and the development of codes of ethics and publishing. The aim of this scoping review was to analyse articles related to aspects of DT published before 1945 in the English language. An expert group discussion was done to create an a priori protocol based on the PRISMA-2020-guidelines' extension for scoping reviews. A systematic search strategy based upon the Population (P), Exposure (E), Comparator (C), Outcome (O) and Time (T) was performed in five databases on 10 February 2022. Filters were used to identify the literature until 1945, and duplicates were removed. The scrutiny of the titles and abstracts and later the full texts was performed as per the pre-defined eligibility criteria. The grey literature and archives of the English language dentistry literature were searched, and a reference search was also performed. A total of 13 studies were selected from the databases and 20 from the reference searching. The first reported article was from the year 1872. Two other case reports had been published by 1899 and three more before World War I (1914). The majority of the studies originated from the United States of America. Nineteen were case reports, five were original research articles, two were classifications and guidelines papers, and one was a review. During the period before 1945, 33 articles were published regarding DT. The articles were mostly related to the description of cases, although there were a few original research papers. A significant observation, contrary to popular belief, was the presence of articles related to conservative management of injuries to tooth roots and the dental pulp. A progression in terms of the quality of protocols over time was also observed.

Keywords: dental traumatology; history; scoping review; traumatic dental injury.