Burning mouth syndrome and micronutrient deficiency: a systematic review protocol
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Burning mouth syndrome (BMS) is a complex orofacial pain disorder characterised by chronic intraoral burning or dysesthesia, typically occurring daily for more than 2 hours per day and persisting for over 3 months. The absence of identifiable causative lesions defines BMS, and symptoms may appear with or without accompanying somatosensory changes, such as altered taste or tactile sensations. This article outlines the development of a systematic review protocol to investigate the prevalence of micronutrient deficiency in patients with BMS and enhance our understanding of possible diagnoses and management of patients with this disorder. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: This systematic review will include observational studies that assessed micronutrient levels (such as iron, folate, cobalamin, zinc and homocysteine) to identify which micronutrients are lower than the normal range in patients with BMS. A literature search will be conducted on 25 August 2025, using the following databases: MEDLINE, Embase, LILACS, Scopus, Web of Science and the grey literature. Key terms such as "Burning Mouth Syndrome", "stomatodynia", "glossopyrosis", "micronutrients" and "vitamins" will be used in our search strategies. Experts in the topic and reference lists of included studies will also be consulted. Two independent reviewers will select the study using a two-phase process. Data collection will be performed by one author and cross-checked by another. The risk of bias assessment will be conducted following the JBI tool. Meta-analyses may be performed to analyse the proportion of patients with micronutrient deficiency for each micronutrient investigated. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This systematic review does not require ethical approval. On completion, it will be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal and presented at a conference. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42024626960.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".