Belén P. Hernández & Marcelo R. Sánchez
Summary
Oral lichen planus is a chronic mucocutaneous inflammatory disease of unknown etiology and is mainly associated with a cellular immune response. In the 1970s, immunoglobulins began to be involved in the etiopathogenesis of the disease and to date the scientific evidence offers us limited and highly varied information with controversial results that require a detailed evaluation of it. We found scarce research (32 articles from 1974 to 2020) and the relative importance of the journals where the studies have been published is miscellaneous (quartile 1, 2, 3, 4 and not indexed). Scientific articles present low methodological quality in 75% (24 articles). The remaining 25% presented medium quality (7 articles) and of these, only 9% (3 articles) found a difference in the presence of immunoglobulins between the groups of cases and controls, and only one article presented high methodological quality (3% ), but their results indicate that there is insufficient information. Our results reveal that the existing scientific evidence regarding the participation of immunoglobulins in the etiopathogenesis of oral lichen planus lacks reliability due to its low-quality methodological quality. We propose to stop thinking about this possibility or to substantially improve the methodology used in future studies.
KEY WORDS: lichenplanus, oral, immunoglobulins, etiology.
How to cite this article
HERNÁNDEZ, B. P. & SÁNCHEZ, M. R. Immunoglobulins in etiopathogenesis of oral liquen planus; The evidence lacks reliability. A scoping review. Int. J. Odontostomat., 15(3):660-665, 2021.