The Impact of Dentine Hypersensitivity on Oral Health-Related Quality of Life

Patient-centered outcomes, and in particular the concept of oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL), have been receiving increasingly more attention in dentistry in recent years. OHRQoL is a construct that measures the impact of oral diseases or conditions on a person’s total health and well-being. Thus, it represents the patient’s self-perception of whether his/her current oral health status has an impact upon his/her actual quality of life. Dentine hypersensitivity (DH), which is a common condition characterized by transient tooth pain arising from exposed dentine in response to different stimuli, may bother the patient during eating, drinking, oral hygiene habits, and sometimes even breathing. These potential limitations on everyday activities are important, as they can affect the patient’s overall quality of life. The aims of this chapter are to introduce the concept of OHRQoL, to describe the instruments that can be used to evaluate OHRQoL in patients with DH, to discuss research findings that have reported that DH substantially impairs OHRQoL, and to discuss how OHRQoL could be more broadly incorporated into assessment of patients diagnosed with DH, to provide more data on the severity and impact of problems being reported.