Impact of Saliva and Intraoral Appliance on Erosion Lesions Rehardening Ability - A Pilot Study

ABSTRACT

Objective: To evaluate the ability of different periods of salivary exposure and two different removable appliances to rehardening initial erosive lesions. Material and Methods: This randomized, single blind in situ study was conducted with 2 crossover phases. The factors under study were period of salivary exposure (15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour and 2 hours) and type of oral appliance (maxillary or mandibular). Two hundred enamel blocks were selected by initial surface hardness (SHi). Enamel blocks were demineralized in vitro (0.05M citric acid; pH2.5 for 15 seconds), surface hardness (SHd) was remeasured and 160 blocks were selected and randomized among groups. Thus, there were 2 blocks per period of salivary exposure in each type of oral appliance for each one of the 10 volunteers. In each phase, one of the removable appliances was tested. The response variable was percentage of surface hardness recovery (%SHR=[(SHf-SHd)/SHi)]x100). Two-way ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc test were applied adopting 5% of significance. Results: No difference was found among oral appliances on enamel rehardening (p>0.01). Salivary exposure of 2 hours promoted similar enamel rehardening when compared to 1 hour (p>0.05), which showed similar rehardening to 30 min. All mentioned period of salivary exposure promoted superior rehardening than 15 min (p>0.01). Conclusion: The salivary time exposure between erosive attacks might be 2 hours to achieve a feasible maximum rehardening. In addition, both maxillary and the mandibular appliance have presented a similar rehardening ability.