Limitations
gingivitis, teeth [
GINGIVITIS, GINGIVAL BLEEDING, DENTAL PLAQUE, ADVERSE EFFECTS, PLAQUE
One of the major limitations of our study was that no long-term effects could be assessed since treatments were performed as a single exercise. We could not report any adverse effects that could be related to more prolonged use of the toothbrushes. RCTs designed to compare the short and long-term effects of different manual toothbrushes are needed to increase the confidence of these findings, which are very low to moderate. Despite our finding that the FT toothbrush is superior in preventing plaque, we did not find that it was better at controlling gingival bleeding. In other words, other aspects such as gingivitis were not assessed. Even though the patients in the study were not shown the product packing or given any additional information about the toothbrushes being tested, they were able to easily distinguish between the different types of toothbrushes. In this light, it is difficult to determine if the statistically significant difference in plaque reduction was due to the FT toothbrush or a placebo effect.The results of this cross-over RCT demonstrated that the OT and the CA toothbrushes are not as effective as the FT toothbrush in removing dental plaque in participants with fixed orthodontic appliances. This indicates that even though the cross-angled bristle tuft designs appear to work better than the flat or multilevel tuft designs in intact teeth [