Evaluating the effect of three fissure preparation techniques on microleakage of a colored flowable composite used as a fissure sealant.

Pit and fissure sealants play an essential role in preventive dentistry. This study evaluates the microleakage levels of a new and colored flowable composite applied as a sealant after three preparation techniques. A total of 24 non-carious mandibular permanent molars with deep pits and fissures were included in the study. Pit and fissures were prepared with 37% phosphoric acid, tungsten carbide bur and fissurotomy burs (SS WHITE Dental, New Jersey, USA) using conventional, enameloplasty and fissurotomy techniques. All samples were thermocycled following the placement of Rainbow Flow (PPH CERKAMED Wojciech Pawlowski, Poland) as a sealant and sections were taken after immersion in methylene blue dye. The microleakage levels of the samples were examined under a stereomicroscope (Olympus SZX-7 Olympus SZ-61 Stereo Microscope) at 2.8× magnification to analyze the dye penetration of the flowable composite. The 144 sections were examined and scoring for microleakage was done by examining the dye penetration from the occlusal border to the base of the fissure. Considering all sections regardless of the preparation technique, it was found that 16.6% of the sections have no leakage. Regarding the microleakage scores, the mean score of the conventional group was 1.87 ± 0.98, the mean score of the enameloplasty group was 1.88 ± 1.14, and the mean score of the fissurotomy group was 1.81 ± 1.1. The median scores of the conventional, enameloplasty and fissurotomy groups were 2, 2 and 1.5, respectively. The present study reports no difference between the microleakage level of a colored flowable composite material used as a pit and fissure sealant following three fissure preparation techniques and supports the clinical use of this material.

Topical Fluoride Applications Related Posts Analysis on Twitter Using Natural Language Processing.

PURPOSE: Social media is today a comprehensive source of data that can serve as a guide to professionals in issues related to public health. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the content of topical fluoride-related Twitter posts made over a 3-year period in order to improve our understanding of Twitter users' perceptions and treatment experiences. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A continuous cross-sectional sample of Tweets on the subject of 'approaches to the topical fluoride treatment of tooth decay' was collected from the Twitter social networking platform between 1 January 2017 and 1 January 2020 using a software application developed for this research that makes use of the Twitter advanced search API. The words and phrases used for the identification of related Tweets were determined through a screening of the topical fluoride keywords of previous studies, and a search was conducted in the English language. To better arrange the collected Tweets and to make the data more meaningful, firstly one of the natural language process techniques - Tokenization - was applied, after which the Tweets were converted into a set of meaningful words and regular expressions. The Tweets were then compared with each other, word-by-word, with the help of a word-based Levenshtein distance algorithm, after which two experts in the computational social science domain labelled each Tweet. RESULTS: A total of 132,358 Tweeter posts referencing topical fluoride applications were collected, of which 110,847 were eliminated through the use of a word-based Levenshtein distance algorithm, and the remaining corpus of 21,511 posts was analysed and evaluated for specific content. Within the garnered data, 48.5% (n = 10,428) of the Tweeter posts concerned topical fluoride treatments, and 7% (n = 1,507) reported experiences with topical fluoride treatment. Negative Tweeter posts about topical fluoride treatment (5,679, 26.4%) vastly outnumbered those that were positive (3,897, 18.1%). CONCLUSION: The current study achieved its main objectives of analysing topical fluoride application-related posts made on social media. From the garnered Twitter data, it can be understood that Twitter users regularly share their concerns and negative sentiments about the side effects of topical fluoride treatments on the platform. Future explorations of social media may aid public health and dental professionals in the development of strategies to educate the public and to raise awareness of the importance of topical fluoride applications.

Prevalence and patterns of tooth agenesis among patients aged 12-22 years: A retrospective study.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to establish the prevalence and patterns of nonsyndromic tooth agenesis in patients referred to a tertiary health care facility. METHODS: The intraoral records and panoramic radiographs of 9,874 patients aged 12-22 years were evaluated. The study group included 716 patients (371 male, 345 female) with non-syndromic agenesis of at least one tooth (except the third molars). The study data were assessed using descriptive statistics, chisquare test, and Mann-Whitney U test, while patterns were evaluated using a tooth agenesis code (TAC) tool. RESULTS: A total of 1,627 congenitally missing teeth, were found in patients with non-syndromic tooth agenesis, with an average of 2.27 missing teeth per patient. The prevalence of tooth agenesis was 7.25%, and the most commonly missing teeth were the left mandibular second premolars (10.17%). The age group comparison revealed no significant difference in the median number of missing teeth per patient according to the cutoff values for ages between 12 and 22 years. When the missing teeth were examined separately according to quadrants, 114 different tooth agenesis patterns (upper right quadrant = 28, upper left quadrant = 27, lower left quadrant = 31, and lower right quadrant = 28) were identified, and 81 of these patterns appeared only once. CONCLUSIONS: This study highlights the benefits of applying the TAC tool in a large sample population. The application of the TAC tool in such studies will enable the development of template treatment plans by determining homogenous patterns of tooth agenesis in certain populations.