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Avoid Dental Cavities With Silica Nanoparticles Enhanced - Ultrafine Polishing

by Tanya Thomas on Dec 22 2008 9:22 AM

If you love your pearly whites and want to keep them that way, researchers at Clarkson University Centre for Advanced Materials Processing suggest the ultrafine polishing for teeth with silica nanoparticles. This protects teeth from cavities.

Professor Igor Sokolov and graduate student Ravi M. Gaikwad adopted polishing technology used in the semiconductor industry (chemical mechanical planarization) to polish the surface of human teeth down to nanoscale roughness.

Roughness left on the tooth after the polishing is just a few nanometers, which is one-billionth of a meter or about 100,000 times smaller than a grain of sand.

The researcher demonstrated that teeth polished in this way become too "slippery" for the "bad" bacteria that is responsible for the destruction of dental enamel.

Thus, it becomes fairly easy to remove the bacteria before they cause damage to the enamel.

While silica particles have been used before for tooth polishing, but polishing with nanosized particles has not been reported as yet.

The researchers hypothesized that such polishing may protect tooth surfaces against the damage caused by cariogenic bacteria, because the bacteria can be removed easily from such polished surfaces.

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The findings were published in a recent issue of the Journal of Dental Research.

Source-ANI
TAN


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