Oral health effects of oil pulling: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials

Abstract

To systematically review the published literature with the purpose of knowing the oral health effects of oil pulling. A systematic review of the literature was conducted across PubMed, PubMed Central, Embase, Google Scholar, Scopus, Campbell systematic review, and Cochrane. All papers published from January 2010 to March 2020 that focused on oil pulling as a study intervention were included in this review. Randomized control trials comparing oil pulling using conventional cooking oil with any controls such as chlorhexidine (CHX), placebo or routine dental hygiene practice were included. Eighty fulltext articles were analyzed initially. Among these 80 articles, only 14 articles fulfilled the research question and were included for review. A maximum of 600 participants were present across the reviewed studies, with study duration ranged between 1 and 45 days. With a high risk of bias in multiple aspects and unclear reporting of others, the methodological quality of the included studies was questionable. Among 14 studies included studies in this systematic review, nine studies compared oil pulling with CHX in the control group in which statistically significant reduction of scores was found in six studies, two studies showed a nonsignificant reduction, and one study did not report about significant difference. The quality of evidence appears to be low to recommend oil pulling as a suitable adjunct to other conventional oral hygiene methods, as most of the included studies had high or unclear risk of bias.

Keywords

• chlorhexidine mouth wash
• coconut oil
• oil pulling
• oral health
• sesame oil