Oral Health and Healthy Ageing: A Systematic Review of Longitudinal Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The global rise in life expectancy and the resulting shift toward ageing populations pose significant public health and socioeconomic challenges. As healthy ageing becomes a priority, understanding the factors that support well-being in older age is essential. Oral health is increasingly recognised as a critical determinant of overall health and has been linked to chronic conditions. Objectives: To conduct a systematic review of longitudinal studies examining the relationship between oral health and healthy ageing. Materials and Methods: Two independent reviewers conducted searches in three databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, and LILACS) up to April 2025, following a defined search strategy. Grey literature was explored using Open Grey and Google Scholar. The quality and the risk of bias of the included studies were evaluated using the Newcastle Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale (NOS) for longitudinal studies. The review protocol was registered with the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (CRD420251029090). Results: Four longitudinal studies reporting the association between oral health and healthy ageing were recognised and included. All selected studies were considered of good quality according to the NOS. The studies varied in defining and measuring healthy ageing, the follow-up period, the sample size, and the measure of oral health; therefore, it was not possible to perform a meta-analysis. The studies included in the review demonstrated a positive relationship between the number of natural teeth and healthy ageing. Discussion: Despite variations in the definition of healthy ageing and the application of different oral health indicators, the review identified significant associations between the number of natural teeth and trajectories of healthy ageing. Conclusions: This review recognised significant longitudinal associations between oral health measures (number of teeth) and trajectories of healthy ageing. The findings emphasise the need to incorporate oral health into research and policy related to healthy ageing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".