The incidence of xerostomia in healthy population with e-cigarettes or combustible tobacco: a meta-analysis

INTRODUCTIONThis study aims to evaluate the prevalence of xerostomia in healthy population with e-cigarettes or/and combustible tobacco.METHODSThe following electronic databases will be searched in this study: Web of Science, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), PubMed, Cochrane Library, Embase, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Scientific Journal Database (VIP), and Wan-Fang Database from inception to 31 March 2022, will be independently carried out by two researchers (XG and LL). The language will be limited to Chinese and English. The data will be analysed using Stata 15.0, and report the prevalence of dry mouth in different healthy smokers.RESULTSTen studies with a total sample size of 5161 cases were included in this study. The overall incidence of dry mouth was 0.27% [95% CI (0.17,0.37)] in the health smoking population and 0.31% [95% CI (0.21,0.42)] in the e-cigarette population. In the combustible tobacco population, the incidence of dry mouth was 0.34% [95% CI (0.1,0.58)].CONCLUSIONSCurrent evidence suggests that the prevalence of xerostomia is high in healthy smoking populations. These findings are restricted by the number and quality of included studies and need to be validated by additional high-quality studies.