Dental Toothpaste Analysis

Dental caries, or cavities as we more commonly know them as, is the erosion of the teeth due to bacteria. The prevalence of dental caries has risen over the past few years, and now affects between 60-90% of schoolchildren and a large number of adults in the population (Harding & O’Mullane, 2013). This is a significant number of the public that is affected by this condition. In the United States, this is the most common chronic disease affecting young children, and if it does untreated it can lead to pain and infections (Harding & O’Mullane, 2013). For a problem this big, it’s thought that the most effective way to treat it would be a widespread type of intervention, in the form of water fluoridation. The addition of fluoride to the water system is an effort to combat the problem of dental caries in the general population. This has been shown by numerous studies to have a great effect on reducing the number …show more content…
(2014) showed that even topical applications of fluoride don’t have much additional benefits if fluoride toothpaste is already being used. In their study, preschool children were either assigned to a experimental or placebo group. The experimental group was given biannual fluoride varnish applications and the control was given a placebo, additionally both groups brushed their teeth with 1000 ppm fluoride toothpaste (Agouropoulos et al., 2014). Their results showed that there was no significant difference between the control and the experimental group as can be seen in Figure 1. As a baseline, 37.8% of the control group had cavities, and after two years, 65.8% had cavities (Agouropoulos et al., 2014). If this is compared to the experimental group, with a baseline of 37.5% having cavities and 64.8% having cavities after two years (Agouropoulos et al., 2014), the difference is very small. From this, it cannot be shown that using a fluoride varnish has any effect on reducing the probability of getting