School dental screening programmes for oral health

• Published in: Cochrane database of systematic reviews 2019-08, Vol.8 (8), p.CD012595
• Main Authors: Arora, Ankita, Khattri, Shivi, Ismail, Noorliza Mastura, Kumbargere Nagraj, Sumanth, Eachempati, Prashanti
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Child; Child health; Child, Preschool; Dental Caries - prevention & control; Dentistry & oral health; Humans; ORAL HEALTH; Pediatric Dentistry; Preventive Medicine; Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic; School Dentistry - methods; School Dentistry - statistics & numerical data; Schools; Tooth Diseases - diagnosis
• ISSN: 1469-493X; 1469-493X
• DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD012595.pub3

School dental screening refers to visual inspection of children's oral cavity in a school setting followed by making parents aware of their child's current oral health status and treatment needs. Screening at school intends to identify children at an earlier stage than symptomatic disease presentation, hence prompting preventive and therapeutic oral health care for the children. This review evaluates the effectiveness of school dental screening in improving oral health status. It is an update of the original review, which was first published in December 2017. To assess the effectiveness of school dental screening programmes on overall oral health status and use of dental services. Cochrane Oral Health's Information Specialist searched the following databases: Cochrane Oral Health's Trials Register (to 4 March 2019), the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL, the Cochrane Register of Studies, to 4 March 2019), MEDLINE Ovid (1946 to 4 March 2019), and Embase Ovid (15 September 2016 to 4 March 2019). The US National Institutes of Health Trials Registry (ClinicalTrials.gov) and the World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Platform were searched for ongoing trials. No restrictions were placed on language or publication status when searching the electronic databases; however, the search of Embase was restricted to the last six months due to the Cochrane Centralised Search Project to identify all clinical trials and add them to CENTRAL. We included randomised controlled trials (RCTs) (cluster or parallel) that evaluated school dental screening compared with no intervention or with one type of screening compared with another. We used standard methodological procedures expected by Cochrane. We included seven trials (five were cluster-RCTs) with 20,192 children who were 4 to 15 years of age. Trials assessed follow-up periods of three to eight months. Four trials were conducted in the UK, two were based in India and one in the USA. We assessed two trials to be at low risk of bias, two trials to be at high risk of bias and three trials to be at unclear risk of bias.None of the trials had long-term follow-up to ascertain the lasting effects of school dental screening.None of the trials reported the proportion of children with untreated caries or other oral diseases, cost effectiveness or adverse events.Four trials evaluated traditional screening versus no screening. We performed a meta-analysis for the outcome 'dental attendanc