Traumatic Dental Injuries

Traumatic dental injuries (TDI) are highly prevalent among children and adolescents throughout the world and exert negative impacts on affected individuals, families, and society. In the present chapter, we perform an in-depth analysis of aspects related to the prevalence, etiology, risk factors, preventive measures, and treatment of TDI in the primary and permanent dentition from an epidemiological standpoint. The network of causality of TDI involves contextual and individual factors. The consistently demonstrated risk factors are the male gender and accentuated overjet, with psychosocial and behavioral characteristics also reported. Recent studies have demonstrated the impact of TDI in both dentitions on oral health-related quality of life, highlighting this problem as an important issue for epidemiological research. The diversity of tooth injuries and difficulty in obtaining informed consent during immediate care are a considerable challenge to the planning and conduction of randomized clinical trials on this topic and constitute a barrier to the development of evidence-based prevention and treatment protocols. Nonetheless, preventive actions and treatment protocols have been suggested for different tooth injuries based on cohort studies and systematic reviews of observational studies.