Mapping oral disease impact with a single metric - Special Issue introduction.

Dental patient-reported outcomes (dPROs) describe how dental patients suffer from oral diseases.1 Thus, dPROs are fundamental for evidence-based dentistry across dental disciplines.2 They are essential to evaluate treatment efficacy and to reduce research waste by addressing questions relevant to clinicians and capturing what matters most to patients.3 Doctor-patient communication centers around them,4 and they are necessary components for value-based oral health care, a concept that relates outcomes to costs.5 Oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) is the most important dPRO. Recent studies have demonstrated that OHRQoL has four main components, so called dimensions - Oral Function, Orofacial Pain, Orofacial Appearance, and Psychosocial Impact.6-8 These four dimensions, characterized by four scores, would allow to "map" all 1,323 oral diseases1 with one, single metric, thus describing oral disease impact with a standardized impact metric across all conditions in all settings. Meta-analytic statistical techniques are available to synthesize these multiple outcomes from differences sources.