The American Dental Association (ADA) and the University of Pennsylvania School of Dentistry recently announced the launch of the ADA Guidelines for Living Project, an innovative initiative believed to be the world’s first program dedicated to providing continuously updated, evidence-based oral health guidelines.
According to the ADA, the project is being jointly promoted by the ADA and the Center for Global Integrated Oral Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dentistry.
The goal is to ensure that oral health service providers have timely access to the latest clinical guidance recommendations as new research results are released.
The Guidelines for Living will be compiled by an independent panel of experts to provide scientific support to patients, clinicians and other health care professionals to assist them in making decisions.
“Oral diseases affect nearly half of the world’s population, and the number of cases is growing even faster than the global population,” said Dr. Ashraf Fouad, chair of the ADA’s Scientific Affairs Committee and professor and chair of the Department of Endodontics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Dentistry.
“The ADA Guidelines for Living will provide dentists and health care professionals with continuously updated, evidence-based information to help improve their patients’ oral health.”
The first update of the project will focus on the evaluation of potential oral malignancies and oral squamous cell carcinoma.
The original guidelines were published in 2017, and the updated guidelines are expected to be publicly available in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on ADA.org later this year.
The guideline topics were selected by an advisory committee comprised of members from the ADA Council on Scientific Affairs and multiple professional and governmental dental organizations.
“This project builds on the ADA’s previous guideline development work and incorporates cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to enable rapid incorporation of new findings from the biomedical literature into existing and new guidelines,” said Alonso Carrasco-Labra, MD, Director and Principal Investigator of the Cochrane Collaborating Center for Oral Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dentistry.
Unlike traditional clinical guidelines, which are updated every three to five years, Living Guidelines uses a new model where new research findings are incorporated into the guidelines as soon as they are reviewed, allowing for faster adoption in clinical practice, policy development, and public health.
“We are very proud to bring this important project to the dental community and look forward to these guidelines improving the oral health of millions of patients,” said Dr. Mark Wolf, Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Morton Amsterdam School of Dental Medicine.
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