Short-term data suggests cognitive benefits in the elderly with single-implant overdentures

Afrashtehfar K I, Jurado C A, Abu Fanas S H, Fabbro M D. Evid Based Dent 2024; 25: 71-72.

Ultimately, dentistry is about making patients feel better and improving their wellbeing, and we in the dental profession do this by having enormous technical and scientific knowledge and expertise. This focus on the technical side of dentistry and scientific accuracy can lead us to focus on clinical and biological measures in our quest for evidence that our treatments are effective. And yet patients do not care about their pocket depths, attachment loss, DMFT, salivary flow rates etc - although we as dentists know that these things are terribly important, and carefully measure them. No, what patients care about is how they feel, how they look, their ability to communicate with confidence, and their acceptability and attractiveness to others. Strangely, none of these are things that we commonly measure in order to determine the success of a treatment.

To try to highlight this, and to some extent in order to try to address this issue in one area of dentistry, EBD has opened a collection of Comments and Systematic Reviews about the use of , one of the most technically focused subspecialties in dentistry. Whilst this Comment by Afrashtehfar et al. is not strictly about a new PROM, it highlights the incredibly important outcomes and sometimes unexpected positive consequences that might be achieved through dental treatment. This paper shows that implants might have very significant and highly important effects on patients' lives - far beyond the known and expected benefits of improved appearance and mastication. This suggests that far wider use of PROMs in dental research could reveal that our profession bring a great deal more to patients that just a healthy mouth.

The full Comment is free to read here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41432-024-00999-4.