A comparison of resin infiltration and microabrasion for postorthodontic white spot lesion.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: The objective of this research was to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of microabrasion and resin infiltration for white spot lesions (WSLs). METHODS: Patients with postorthodontic WSLs were enrolled and randomly assigned to the control, microabrasion, and resin-infiltration groups. Intraoral photographs were taken before and after (6 months later) treatment. WSL sizes were determined through ImageJ (Wayne Rasband, Kensington, Md). Integrated optical density (IOD) was determined for a WSL and its surrounding normal enamel through Image-Pro Plus (version 6.0; Media Cybernetics, Rockville, Md), and their differences of IOD were considered as the IOD surrogate for that WSL. The color change of WSL were measured through ΔE. RESULTS: A total of 27 eligible patients were enrolled; 9 subjects were assigned to each group, resulting in 56 teeth in the control group, 72 in the microabrasion group, and 58 in the resin-infiltration group. The ratios of WSL size (after/before) were similar between the microabrasion and resin-infiltration group (43.94 ± 0.03% vs 45.02 ± 0.03%; P = 0.96 > 0.05), but those of the 2 groups were significantly lower than those of the control group (92.15 ± 0.02%) (P <0.001). Moreover, the ratios of IOD (after/before) were significantly lower in the resin-infiltration group (22.94 ± 0.02%) than in the microabrasion (78.11 ± 0.03%) and control (83.79 ± 0.02%) (P <0.001) groups. The highest ΔE improvement was obtained by infiltration, but there was no significant difference between microabrasion and control group. CONCLUSIONS: Resin infiltration and microabrasion are comparably effective in reducing the sizes of WSL, but resin infiltration enjoys an esthetic advantage over microabrasion.