Relationships between Oral Health and the Sustainable Development Goals: A Scoping Review

Abstract

The aim of this scoping review was to map the research that links oral health and sustainable development goals (SDGs). The question that guided this review was what is the published evidence specifically linking oral health and SDGs? The search of articles published between 2015 and June 2023 in English was conducted in June 2023 in PubMed, Web of Science, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, and Scopus. The extracted data from the 12 of the 520 publications that met the inclusion criteria were synthesized. These were publications from the African (n = 2) and European (n = 1) regions. Ten of the studies were not country specific. There were three observational studies. The referenced SDGs were SDG 1 (n = 1), SDG 3 (n = 11), SDG 4 (n = 3), SDG 5 (n = 2), and SDG 13 (n = 1). The studies linking oral health to SDG3 discussed a range of issues related to integrated oral health care, dental education on the SDGs, improved health equalities, access to universal health care, and sustainable health approaches. The small number of studies identified suggests the need to take proactive steps to generate research-based evidence that explores the interplay between oral diseases, oral health, and SDGs to address the dearth in the literature. By so doing, resources allocated to the SDGs can also be effectively uses to control oral diseases.

Keywords

• sustainable development goals
• oral health
• universal health coverage
• dental caries
• periodontitis
• edentulism