Summary of: Tooth-whitening activity of a novel home-bleaching systemutilising thermal diffusion: a multifactorial simultaneous evaluation of efficacy at cervical, body and incisal tooth sites

Key Points

• Monitors the intensities of different tooth shade parameters simultaneously at three different regions of stained 'smile-zone' teeth.

• Studies the differential response of the cervical, body and incisal tooth areas to tooth-whitening treatment.

• Analyses the highly significant reduction observed for the tooth shade parameter a^* by the treatment applied, which is difficult to achieve in clinical practice.

Abstract

Introduction The ability of a thermal diffusion system (TDS) to promote the tooth-whitening actions of a bleaching gel/bleaching activator combination product (containing a final hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) content of 10.0% (w/v)) towards discoloured 'smile-zone' teeth was examined.

Methods Fifty teeth in 15 participants aged 18-62 years were investigated. The CIE tooth shade parameters L^*, a^* and b^*, together with Vitapan shade scores (VSSs), were simultaneously recorded at three separate tooth areas (cervical, body and incisal sites) with a novel spectrophotometric monitoring system before treatment, and also at 14 days after completion of a 10-day treatment period in which the product was applied 'at-home' (twice daily).

Results The tooth-whitening treatment administered gave rise to extremely significant increases in L^*, and decreases in the a^* and b^* shade parameters for each of the tooth areas investigated (p <10⁻10). Post-treatment mean decreases in the VSS values were 8.26, 9.70 and 9.14 for the cervical, body and incisal areas respectively (p <10⁻⁸ in each case). Mean ΔE values determined post-treatment were also very highly significant for each tooth region examined (p <10⁻10 in each case).

Conclusions The tooth-whitening system tested exerted extremely powerful bleaching actions in all tooth areas investigated. The order of tooth-whitening effectiveness was body > incisal > cervical for Δb^* and ΔE, and incisal > body > cervical for Δa^* and ΔL^*, and this may reflect the TDS's ability to promote the penetration of H₂O₂ to intrinsic stain sites.

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