“Pediatrics” is a medical specialty concerned with maintaining health and providing medical care to children from birth to adolescence. Oral health is an essential part of overall health and wellbeing. Good oral health needs not only sound teeth and periodontium, but also the wellbeing of all structures of the mouth, jaw, oral, and peri-oral tissues. Most oral health conditions are largely preventable in children and can be treated in their early stages. Caries represent one of the most common non-communicable diseases [1] and the most prevalent among oral diseases in childhood, despite being easily prevented [2,3]. Factors contributing to oral diseases are an unhealthy diet (rich in fermentable sugars), inadequate oral hygiene, and low fluoride exposure [4,5,6].

The prevalence of untreated dental caries is high worldwide. Data from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2015 show that 3.5 billion people live with dental health-related issues globally [1,7]. Nevertheless, essential oral care is still not provided to many children, especially in low and middle-income countries [8,9,10,11]. According to WHO, treatment for oral health conditions is expensive and usually not part of universal health coverage; in most high-income countries, dental treatment averages 5% of total health expenditure and 20% of out-of-pocket health expenditure [4]. In addition to caries, it is very common that hard dental tissues have developmental defects of enamel (DDE) and dentine, which can affect both primary and permanent dentitions [12]. The ameloblasts, the cells that produce enamel, are very sensitive to any local/systemic alteration, even if it lasts a few days [13,14]. Common DDE are qualitative enamel alterations like Molar Incisor Hypomineralization (MIH), affecting 13–14% of children worldwide [15,16]. Dental traumas are also a frequent childhood experience; the prevalence occurs from 6.1% to 62.1% in toddlers and pre-school children [17], and from 5.3% to 21.0% in schoolchildren [18]. Regarding periodontium diseases, plaque-induced gingivitis has been reported in the majority of samples of adolescents screened worldwide, with a prevalence of about 30%. Gingival inflammation is a well-documented disease in children and adolescents, especially with poor oral hygiene and those affected by systemic pathologies like diabetes or leukemia [19,20,21]. Untreated gingivitis, later in life, is highly connected to periodontitis development and tooth loss [22,23]. Teeth and jaws are the keys of the occlusion, and malocclusion conditions are well spread in all ethnic groups [24], with between 57% and 59% of the population need some degree of orthodontic treatment [25]. Many studies have shown an association between malocclusion and worse oral health-related quality of life in children and adolescents [26], due to the functional and social importance of the oral cavity. It appears evident that reaching adequate oral health is a global challenge that can’t be achieved by dental professionals alone [8,27,28].

Dentists are the specialists of oral health. In the majority of countries, they are enrolled in a separate faculty from medical students. During the past decades, dentistry developed in many hyper specialties, and pediatric dentistry is one of them. Anyway, this evolution leads to an estrangement of highly related branches of medicine like pediatric dentistry and pediatrics [28,29]. These specializations should share common knowledge to reach comprehensive treatments for children, but this is often unreal, due to their impressive detachment. This separation, which starts from university, develops in different paths of post-degree courses and updates. Nowadays, most practitioners commonly use online databases, such as PubMed and official flagship journals of the main scientific organizations, to find information that would increase their competencies in everyday practice [30]. Insufficient knowledge of pediatric personnel (pediatrics, midwives, and pediatric nurses) on the preventive and mini-invasive dental/oral treatments have been reported to lead to a late referral to the pediatric dentist. An overall higher biological and economic cost for public health institutions and families was also reported [31]. This could also be the consequence of a lack of sufficient production of papers on dental topics in dedicated journals, but no evidence is available so far on this issue. A scoping review was designed and performed to investigate the literature addressing dental topics published in pediatric journals.