Tooth surfaces – Polished to perfection

Brush your teeth twice a day! Any child knows these days that regular tooth care is the only way to banish the bacteria that cause caries. Yet sometimes that is not enough. The tooth surface wears down and gets uneven – and the problem is that dental plaque adheres particularly well to a rough surface.

Dentists therefore offer professional cleaning services, removing plaque and discoloration with abrasive prophylactic pastes. This renders the tooth surface beautifully smooth, making it difficult for bacteria to gain a foothold.

Yet there is a risk that the polishing treatment will also grind away precious tooth enamel and dentin at the exposed necks of teeth. The manufacturers therefore have to find the happy medium when developing their prophylactic pastes: The pastes should be just abrasive enough to remove superficial discoloration and plaque, but preferably not wear down the tooth enamel.

Until now, scientists lacked any realistic objective measuring techniques to assess tooth abrasion caused by chewing and by the effect of toothpastes. A leading manufacturer of dental hygiene products asked the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM in Freiburg, one of whose specialties is the analysis and visualization of surface roughness, to help them develop new prophylactic pastes. The effectiveness of a prophylactic paste has so far been measured by how well the granules that it contains are able to smoothen a rough surface. The test is performed by first roughening tooth enamel or denture materials such as ceramics and titanium to a precisely defined value with an aggressive grinding material.

But this does not truly reflect reality, as chewing wears out different materials at different rates. The new measuring method developed by the IWM researchers, a kind of chewing simulation, takes this factor into account. As the experts led by Dr. Raimund Jaeger, head of the Biomedical Materials and Implants department, discovered when comparing pastes and subsequently analyzing the surfaces, some pastes polish the surface but also unnecessarily ablate the tooth material, producing slight grooves on the tooth surface.

The ideal paste, on the other hand, polishes so lightly that only the roughness is eliminated while the tooth enamel is hardly ground at all. “Obviously, every case is different,” says Jaeger. “Teeth with particularly heavy plaque or discoloration will need a more abrasive paste.” Normally, however, a gentler prophylactic paste will do the job. Thanks to the IWM researchers, the manufacturer has now been able to optimize the formulation.

All latest news from the category: Health and Medicine

This subject area encompasses research and studies in the field of human medicine.

Among the wide-ranging list of topics covered here are anesthesiology, anatomy, surgery, human genetics, hygiene and environmental medicine, internal medicine, neurology, pharmacology, physiology, urology and dental medicine.

Back to home

Comments (0)

Write a comment

Newest articles

Lighting up the future

New multidisciplinary research from the University of St Andrews could lead to more efficient televisions, computer screens and lighting. Researchers at the Organic Semiconductor Centre in the School of Physics and…

Researchers crack sugarcane’s complex genetic code

Sweet success: Scientists created a highly accurate reference genome for one of the most important modern crops and found a rare example of how genes confer disease resistance in plants….

Evolution of the most powerful ocean current on Earth

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current plays an important part in global overturning circulation, the exchange of heat and CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere, and the stability of Antarctica’s ice sheets….

Partners & Sponsors