At ADA 2014 – America’s Dental Meeting, the House of Delegates adopted the Association’s first definition for term oral health, which reads as follows: “Oral health is a functional, structural, aesthetic, physiologic and psychosocial state of well-being and is essential to an individual’s general health and quality of life.” 

This consensus-based definition, developed by the ADA Council on Scientific Affairs, is an attempt to bring clarity and a common understanding to this central concept, and to emphasize that oral health is more than the absence of oral disease: It is essential to an individual’s general health, and quality of life.”