Oral Cenesthopathy: A Scoping Review

Background and rationale Oral cenesthopathy refers to persistent, bizarre abnormal sensations in the mouth — such as foreign bodies, slime, crawling or deformation — that patients hold with delusional or near-delusional conviction, without a corresponding organic finding. The term derives from the French cénestopathie introduced by Dupré and Camus in 1907 and remains in use mainly in Japanese and European psychiatry (Umezaki et al., 2016). In DSM- and ICD-based literature, similar presentations are described as delusional disorder of somatic type, oral somatic delusions or delusional oral parasitosis (Maeda et al., 1998; Umezaki et al., 2018). Patients usually present to dentists first, and symptoms are often attributed to preceding dental or prosthetic treatment. Published work includes a retrospective series of 606 patients (Umezaki et al., 2018), studies of regional cerebral blood flow (Umezaki et al., 2013), a dedicated rating scale (Uezato et al., 2014), reports linking the condition to neurodegenerative disorders (Umezaki et al., 2020), and case reports of varied treatments, from antipsychotics and antidepressants to electroconvulsive therapy (Uezato et al., 2012; Karakuş & Bulut, 2021). This literature is scattered across dental, psychiatric and neurological journals, uses inconsistent terms, and is concentrated in one country and a few research groups. A preliminary search of PubMed and Scopus on 31 October 2026 retrieved 36 unique potentially relevant records, mostly case reports, and confirmed this heterogeneity. A search of OSF Registries, PROSPERO, JBI Evidence Synthesis, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and PubMed on 10/31/2026 found no completed or ongoing systematic or scoping review on this topic. A scoping review is therefore appropriate to map how the condition is conceptualised, described, assessed and managed, and to identify gaps for future primary research and for consensus on diagnostic criteria.