Oral and maxillofacial complications of COVID-19 infection; a Review

Abstract

Introduction: The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a group of viruses that cause disease in birds and mammals and currently has more than 398.572.320 infected and 5.770.578 victims worldwide. Common clinical symptoms are fever, headache, dyspnea, sore throat, dry cough, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and nausea. On the other hand, the results of various studies related to oral and maxillofacial manifestations in patients with COVID-19 have reported contradictory results in different places, which shows the role of different geographical and individual factors in the occurrence of oral manifestations. The aim of the present study was to review the oral and maxillofacial manifestations in patients with or improved COVID-19 infection. Materials and Methods: This study is a narrative review. In this study, research published in Pubmed, Google Scholar and Scopus databases has been reviewed by a review method and with a keyword search strategy. Results: 4011 articles were found from the mentioned databases, and after deleting unrelated researches (3607 cases) and duplicate researches (358 cases), 46 articles remained for final review. Then, from this number, those research that were presented in the scientific conference and were in the form of abstracts or did not have a correct statistical population were excluded from the study (10 cases). Conclusion: COVID-19 is a new and rapidly evolving disease, and many of its features, including its associated oral manifestations, are still under investigation. No agreement has yet been reached on the nature and classification of oral lesions in COVID-19 and their causal relationship to disease progression. This limitation is reflected in systematic reviews such as the present article. In addition, there is a significant shortage of high-quality studies on the prevalence of these oral manifestations and this limitation affects the prevalence estimates presented in this study.