A new measure of teeth‐cleaning efficiency and periodontal disease

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Abstract
This paper presents a new measure of teeth-cleaning efficiency based on information from a random sample of 400 factory employees and a separate (non-random) sample of some 400 skilled manual workers and their wives. Regression analysis showed that only 1/3 of the variance in calculus levels in the random sample was explained by age, frequency of visits to a dentist, socioeconomic group and smoking habits (other variables tested - gender, date of last dental visit, frequency of teeth-brushing and sugar consumption - were not significant). The corresponding regression for the skilled manual sample gave a broadly similar result, though the proportion of explained variance (1/5) was lower than for the random sample. These results indicated the presence of one or more additional factors, of which teeth-cleaning efficiency is likely to be the most important. A new measure of cleaning efficiency was then constructed by expressing the actual calculus level as a proportion of the level estimated from the regression equation, and deducting this proportion from unity. It this new measure is, indeed, a genuine indicator of teeth-cleaning efficiency, then one should expect it to be an important element in an explanation of the level of periodontal disease, but not of dental caries (which is a resultant essentially of dietary habits). This hypothesis was tested and confirmed by multiple regression analysis. Though the new measure of teeth cleaning efficiency is essentially experimental, and has yet to be validated by clinical testing, the results strongly suggest that efficient cleaning can have a major beneficial impact on the level of periodontal disease, thus underlining the importance which effective dental health education could have in reducing the level of this disease.

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