Background: Over time, improvements have been made in dentifrices and recently bioactive components have been added. It is important to address the abrasivity of these dentifrices, which can cause wear of dental restorative materials.
Objectives: A comparative study was conducted to examine the effects of commercial and experimental dentifrices upon commonly used dental restorative materials.
Material and methods: Three types of experimental dentifrices were prepared with variable concentrations of fluoride-based bioactive glass, nano-zinc oxide (ZnO) and titanium dioxide (TiO2) powder as active ingredients. A custom-made toothbrush simulator was used with variable cycles (0; 5,000; and 10,000) to treat samples prepared from dental restorative materials. Prior to and after the treatment cycles, the physical properties of the restorative materials were assessed and compared with commercial toothpaste through micro-hardness, surface roughness and color stability testing.
Results: The restorative materials showed an insignificant difference in terms of micro-hardness before and after the treatment with all dentifrices. A significant difference was observed in terms of surface roughness. With respect to color stability, there has been observed an insignificant difference between the control and the other 3 experimental dentifrices for all the cycles - pre, post-5,000 and post-10,000.
Conclusions: Experimental fluoride-containing bioactive dentifrices caused a change in the restorative material properties; however, it was minimal and the properties still met the requirements for clinical applications.
Keywords: dental composites; dentifrices; fluoride-bioactive glass; resin-modified glass-ionomer cement; zinc oxide.