The American Dental Association and the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine have announced the creation of the ADA Living Guideline Program, which they describe as the first known initiative dedicated to providing continuously updated, evidence-informed oral health guidelines.
According to the ADA, the program is a collaborative effort with Penn Dental Medicine’s Center for Integrative Global Oral Health and is intended to give oral health providers access to current clinical recommendations as new evidence becomes available. The guidelines will be formulated by independent panels and are designed to support decision-making for patients, clinicians, and other healthcare professionals.
“Oral disease is estimated to affect almost half the world’s population, and the number of cases is growing faster than the population worldwide,” said Dr. Ashraf Fouad, chair of the ADA Council on Scientific Affairs and professor and chair of the Department of Endodontics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Dentistry. “The ADA Living Guideline Program will provide dentists and other healthcare professionals continually updated, evidence-based information to help improve the oral health of their patients.”
According to the ADA, the program’s first guideline update will focus on the evaluation of potentially malignant disorders and oral squamous cell carcinoma in the oral cavity. The original guideline was published in 2017. The first updated recommendation is expected to be released later this year in The Journal of the American Dental Association and on ADA.org.
Guideline topics are selected by an advisory group that includes members from the ADA Council on Scientific Affairs and several other professional and governmental dental organizations.
“This initiative builds upon previous foundational work on guideline development at the American Dental Association and leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies to enable continuous and rapid incorporation of scientific findings from the biomedical literature into new and existing guidelines,” said Dr. Alonso Carrasco-Labra, principal investigator and director of the Cochrane Oral Health Collaborating Center at Penn Dental Medicine.
According to the ADA, living guidelines retain the methodological standards of traditional guidelines, but they differ by incorporating newly published research as soon as it is reviewed. Traditional clinical guidelines are typically updated every three to five years. The new model allows for more immediate application of findings to clinical practice, policy development, and public health.
“We are proud to bring this important service to our profession and look forward to improving the oral health of millions of patients through these guidelines,” said Dr. Mark S. Wolff, Morton Amsterdam Dean at Penn Dental Medicine.
Additional information about existing ADA guidelines is available at ADA.org/guidelines.
