Assessment of pretreatment orthodontic patients using the BANA test

Abstract

Ninety-two subjects were tested before orthodontic mechanotherapy for the presence of three putative periodontopathogens— Porphyromonas gingivalis, Treponema denticola, and Bacteroides forsythus—with the BANA test (PerioScan Oral-B). The sample ranged from 9 to 16 years, with a mean age of 13.1 years, and consisted of 51% girls and 49% boys; 48% African American, 46% white, 4% Asian, and 2% Hispanic. Unlike other BANA studies that examined children and adolescents with a 15-minute incubation time, this research used a 5-minute incubation time to increase the specificity and to reduce the false positives obtained from the PerioScan cards. No statistically significant difference was found between the age, gender, or race of the patients and the levels of the three putative periodontopathogens. A Friedman two-way analysis of variance assessed the BANA levels for three groups of teeth: molars, incisors, and premolars. The central incisors and first molars had a significantly higher percentage of positive BANA readings than the first premolars at p ≤ 0.05. The clinical importance of this finding has yet to be determined, however, because the central incisor and first molar are the first permanent teeth to erupt, a possible association between dental emergence time and the rate of infection with various organisms may be postulated. In a pilot study, 10 patients from a statistically comparable pretreatment group were assessed longitudinally at two separate collection times separated by 4 months. The Wilcoxin signed rank test indicated no significant changes in these patients over the 4-month period.