“…Another reason for exclusion was variations in measurement of den-tal caries prevalence for both the case and control groups. Therefore, a total of 43 articles [Schamschula et al, 1980;de Muñiz, 1985;del Rio Gomez, 1991;Jones et al, 1992;Rao and Bharambe, 1993;Grim et al, 1994;Davies et al, 1997;Hallett and O'Rourke, 2002;Endean et al, 2004;Schroth et al, 2005;Zeng et al, 2005;Jamieson et al, 2006a, b;Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2007;Jamieson et al, 2007a, b;Brennan et al, 2007;Lawrence et al, 2008;Medina et al, 2008;Gowda et al, 2009;Lawrence et al, 2009;Phelan et al, 2009;Jamieson et al, 2010a, b;Dogar et al, 2011;Foster Page and Murray Thomson, 2011;Page and Thomson, 2011;Singh et al, 2011;Kumar et al, 2013;Kapellas et al, 2014;Drummond et al, 2015;John et al, 2015 2015; Shen et al, 2015;Arrow, 2016;Jamieson et al, 2016a;Schuch et al, 2017;Miranda et al, 2018;Shi et al, 2018;Simangwa et al, 2018;Haag et al, 2020;Arantes et al, 2021] met the inclusion criteria and were included in this review for descriptive analysis. A total of 34 articles were included for meta-analysis...…”