A Scoping Review of 4 Decades of Outcomes in Nonsurgical Root Canal Treatment, Nonsurgical Retreatment, and Apexification Studies—Part 2: Outcome Measures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Inconsistencies in the definitions of endodontic outcome terminology jeopardize evaluations of proposed interventions and patient care quality. This scoping review aimed to provide groundwork to develop a set of basic outcomes in endodontics. METHODS: We performed a comprehensive literature search for randomized controlled trials, cohort studies, case-control studies, and case series (≥10 patients) published after 1980 with patients ≥10 years of age with any preoperative pulpal and periapical diagnosis in permanent teeth requiring nonsurgical root canal treatment, retreatment, or apexification. Abstracted data on outcome assessment methods, assessors, and domains were reported after univariate and bivariate analyses. RESULTS: Treatment outcomes were evaluated radiographically (88%) or clinically (73%). Although 2-dimensional radiography exceeded 3-dimensional radiography, the use of the latter has increased since 2010, mostly for nonsurgical retreatments. Of 19 identified outcomes, 5 were most frequent: success (168 studies, 40%), radiographic healing (128 studies, 30%), survival (of an asymptomatic tooth [48 studies, 12%] or of a procedure code in administrative databases [31 studies, 7%]), pain assessment (14 studies, 3%), and quality of life (11 studies, 3%). Clinician-centered outcomes have been most frequently studied since the 1980s (71%), in academic settings (76%), and using a prospective design (45%). Patient-centered outcomes were reported in 19% of studies before 2010 and 30% since 2010. They were more common among retrospective studies (49%). CONCLUSIONS: Patient-centered outcome measures are lacking in endodontic studies. The state of available research can provide a baseline for the development of a core outcome set in endodontics, which should represent the important patient-centered outcomes in conjunction with well-validated clinician-centered outcomes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".