The incidence of oral and maxillofacial lesions in children over a 10-year period (2010-2020) in East Azerbaijan

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate pediatric patients aged < 12 years who had oral and maxillofacial lesions and were referred to the Tabriz Pediatric Hospital during the 10-year period of 2010-2020. In this prospective, cross-sectional study, documents with final diagnosis were separated, and the demographic data of the patients, including age, sex, and location of lesions, were collected from the records. Microscopic slides of each case were reviewed by two pathologists. The lesions were classified into the following five categories: developmental lesion, benign tumors, malignant tumors, infectious lesions, and inflammatory lesions. One-way ANOVA was applied to compare the frequency of the lesions using SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 17.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Overall, 9,314 biopsy records of pediatric patients aged ≤12 years were studied. We identified and analyzed 8,993 cases with inflammatory lesions, 171 with developmental lesions, 71 with reactive lesions, 64 with benign tumors, and 15 with malignant tumors. Furthermore, the most common lesion site was the neck ( >98.5%), and the most uncommon site was the nasal area, accounting for only two lesions. Moreover, among inflammatory lesions, follicular hyperplasia and tonsillitis were the most common with a frequency of 99.1% (8,916 cases) observed in 3,656 (40.7%) female and 5,337 (59.3%) male. Sixty-nine (40.4%) female and 102 (59.6%) male had developmental lesions. The present results showed that the most common type was inflammatory lesion whereas the least common type was malignant lesion.