A comparison of resin infiltration and microabrasion for postorthodontic white spot lesion

Abstract

The objective of this research was to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of microabrasion and resin infiltration for white spot lesions (WSLs). Patients with postorthodontic WSLs were enrolled and randomly assigned to the control, microabrasion, and resin-infiltration groups. Intraoral photographs were taken before and after (6months later) treatment. WSL sizes were determined through ImageJ (Wayne Rasband, Kensington, Md). Integrated optical density (IOD) was determined for a WSL and its surrounding normal enamel through Image-Pro Plus (version 6.0; Media Cybernetics, Rockville, Md), and their differences of IOD were considered as the IOD surrogate for that WSL. The color change of WSL were measured through ΔE. A total of 27 eligible patients were enrolled; 9 subjects were assigned to each group, resulting in 56 teeth in the control group, 72 in the microabrasion group, and 58 in the resin-infiltration group. The ratios of WSL size (after/before) were similar between the microabrasion and resin-infiltration group (43.94±0.03% vs 45.02±0.03%; P=0.96>0.05), but those of the 2 groups were significantly lower than those of the control group (92.15±0.02%) (P<0.001). Moreover, the ratios of IOD (after/before) were significantly lower in the resin-infiltration group (22.94±0.02%) than in the microabrasion (78.11±0.03%) and control (83.79±0.02%) (P<0.001) groups. The highest ΔE improvement was obtained by infiltration, but there was no significant difference between microabrasion and control group. Resin infiltration and microabrasion are comparably effective in reducing the sizes of WSL, but resin infiltration enjoys an esthetic advantage over microabrasion.