Manifestations of systemic connective tissue diseases on the oral mucosa: a literature review

Abstract

Annotation. Despite the modern high level of medical care, autoimmune connective tissue diseases cause a lot of questions among scientists and are a significant problem for society. At the same time, in the scientific works available today, little attention is paid to the manifestations of connective tissue diseases in the oral cavity and modern diagnostics of the main types of dental pathology in such patients, which would have great scientific and practical importance. Therefore, the purpose of the review article was to perform an analysis of the scientific literature regarding orofacial manifestations of autoimmune connective tissue diseases. When using the following databases: PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science and various combinations of keywords and subject headings of MESH such as “oral manifestations”, “oral mucosal lesions”, “autoimmune diseases”, “rheumatic diseases”, “connective tissue diseases”, “systemic lupus erythematosus”, “rheumatoid arthritis”, “systemic sclerosis”, “Sjögren’s syndrome”, “dermatomyositis”, 40 articles were chosen, which corresponded to the purpose of the study. The search results indicate that there is a direct correlation between the duration of the main disease and the severity of oral symptoms. Pronounced hyposalivation and dryness of oral mucosa are the most similar common signs of autoimmune diseases, which contributes to functional disorders and diseases of oral cavity. Oral manifestations are quite often a side effect of the treatment of connective tissue diseases. The pathology of oral mucosa in autoimmune diseases remains not well-understood, so makes it difficult to clarify its pathogenesis in detail, that would allow for the development of justified measures of prevention and treatment.