Air polishing therapy in supportive periodontal treatment: a systematic review

The aim of the study was an analysis of the tooth surface roughness and clinical parameters by systematic review of the literature to compare the efficacy of airpolishing to hand or ultrasonic instrumentation during supportive periodontal therapy (SPT). It was using a research question using PICO method. The bibliographic researches were performed in four different databases. For the search of the articles, the work was divided into two parts: the first part for analyse the clinical parameters of the air polishing in the supportive periodontal therapy, the second part to analyse the effects of air-polishing on hard tissues. From 164 articles concerning clinical parameters, 49 were reached with the criteria of inclusion; from 64 articles concerning hard tissues it has reached 4. Excluding of the doubles, 12 were chosen for the literature review: 8 RCTs, 1 retrospective cohort study and 3 in vitro studies. The scientific literature has shown that air-polishing and scaling and root planing in supportive periodontal therapy give similar clinical results, but airpolishing seems to preserve the hard tissues of the tooth more than the traditional treatment with ultrasonic or manual instrumentations.