4. Discussion
gingivitis, TNF-α
GINGIVITIS, PLAQUE
Our main finding is that probiotics may contribute to recovering the baseline composition of the supragingival microbiota in the resolution period after biofilm-induced gingivitis (It is, therefore, noteworthy that As expected, oral hygiene discontinuation had a massive clinical impact (In the present study, salivary albumin concentration, chitinase and amylase activity, and TPA remained comparable between groups at days 14 and 28 (On the other hand, we were not able to detect any impact of 14 days of oral hygiene neglect on the salivary IL-1β, IL-8, MIF, or MCP-1 levels in either the placebo or the probiotics groups (Accordingly, several limitations apply to the present study including the monitoring of solely pro-inflammatory cytokines, of which we were unable to detect any impact. Therefore, future probiotics studies should consider monitoring different pro-inflammatory cytokines such as TNF-α and anti-inflammatory cytokines including IL-10 and IL-17 and should use GCF instead of saliva samples. However, if evaluating GCF, it is essential to note that the evaluation would be site-specific. Another limitation was the size of the cohort which, despite a considerable sample size, turned out to be underpowered in terms of the clinical endpoints tested. Specifically, a post hoc analysis of the clinical data performed with twice the sample size showed a significant difference between groups in terms of the plaque score at day 14 (