Oral examination
tooth
PLAQUE
Baseline and 6- and 12-month examinations were performed by a dentist with more than 30 years of experience as a general practitioner and 4 years of experience in clinical research examinations, and a licensed hygienist, also with 30 years of experience in general dental care and for the past 10 years at a research clinic conducting clinical research examinations.The investigators worked with examinator alignment and assessment by first going through selected survey methods and the criteria of the scoring scales and then continuing to jointly conduct the first eleven examinations to evaluate the examination routines and the consistency of the survey findings. As there is no golden standard to compare with in this type of examination as there is no flawless examiner, the discrepancy between the two examiners has been calculated. For the detection of 4 mm pockets, the difference amounted to 7.4%, for BOP to 11.6%, and for plaque surfaces to 0.3%. After that, regular joint reviews were conducted in doubtful cases and in randomly selected participants throughout the study.Participant visits were booked randomly, so one researcher did not always examine the same participant.The number of remaining teeth, PI, BOP, and sites with PPD ≥ 4 mm was recorded. PI was measured on each tooth’s four surfaces: mesial, distal, buccal, and lingual, according to O’Leary’s plaque index [