Misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis of trigeminal neuralgia in African health care and dental settings: a scoping review

This scoping review is designed to map and synthesize available evidence on misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis of trigeminal neuralgia in African health care and dental settings. The Population Concept Context (PCC) framework will be adopted to guide the inclusion and the exclusion criteria. Studies on trigeminal neuralgia, reporting misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis in the health care and dental settings in Africa will be included in the study. It will involve a systematic search of PubMed, AJOL, Scopus and Web of Science and CINAHL databases including grey literature sources. No date restriction will be applied, and a wide range of study designs will be accommodated in order to capture a wide range of articles. Following deduplication of all articles, initial title and abstract screening will be done by two individuals and conflict will be resolved by a third party. Final screening will be conducted to exclude studies that are not eligible. Standardized extraction formats will be used to obtain information from each study, and the results will be synthesized descriptively as narrations, tables and charts. Expected outcome include a description of diagnostic delays, unnecessary procedures to TN patients, and significant evidence gaps across African regions.