#isdh 2019: Trends in dental hygiene

As an exhibitor, W&H impressed the specialist trade audience with its ground-breaking ioDent® solutions and treatment workflow concepts, such as NIWOP. The latest developments for optimized treatment planning were presented in conjunction with Osstell AB, member and technology partner of the W&H Group. At the Osstell Scientific Symposium on 26 September, around 400 visitors were registered including organizers and speakers setting a new record!

LEAD – Leadership, Empowerment, Advances & Diversity“!

The participants were then able to choose from a selection of talks around the motto Leadership, Empowerment, Advances, Diversity or one of the sponsor-organized presentations. The range of subjects was extremely varied. Janet Wallace presented her impressive organization ‘Senior Smiles’ and talked about her long and difficult, but ultimately successful journey. Senior Smiles aims to improve oral health in Australian care homes, by focusing on prevention. After carrying out multiple studies and using various approaches, she came to one very clear conclusion: oral hygiene in care homes should under no circumstances be the responsibility of the existing staff members, as they are already fully stretched with their usual workload. Instead, a system should be created in which oral health professionals can be incorporated into the on-site team and given responsibility for these important tasks.

Another key issue discussed at ISDH was the new classification of periodontal and peri-implant diseases. In November 2017, European and American periodontology specialists met in Chicago to develop the new classification, which was presented for the first time at EuroPerio 2018. Sašo Ivanovski gave an eloquent summary of the most important changes in Brisbane, focusing on the new staging and grading system for the classification of periodontal diseases.

At the end of every week, our iPad shows how many minutes we have ‘spent’ with it – for many of us, this will probably be well over 35 minutes. And 35 minutes is the exact amount of time each week that our patients should spend on their oral hygiene at home: 2 x 2 minutes per day for teeth brushing, plus 1 x 1 minute daily for interdental cleaning. But why is it so difficult to convince our patients that this is what they should be doing? Kerstin Öhrn set about answering this question. The key conclusions from her presentation were that we need to treat the individual person rather than the disease, and that the optimization of oral hygiene at home is the most important part of periodontal treatment – which means we need to be consistently and regularly advising and motivating our patients!

Thomas Viola and JoAnn Gurenlian talked about the importance of dental professionals for the treatment of cancer patients. This session covered a range of topics, from giving an update on the most important medications and associated complications – from a dental point of view, these include primarily xerostomia and mucositis – through to treatment options. The best way to prevent mucositis in cancer patients is to ensure optimal oral hygiene. In terms of treatment, the best option is still ice cubes (or frozen fruit, such as grapes). New directives will be announced soon, and will reveal whether low-level laser treatment is a promising approach in the treatment of mucositis. Again, the conclusion drawn here was that oral health professionals should be included in multidisciplinary teams for the treatment of cancer patients.

Ann-Marie Roos Jansåker explained the importance of behaving in a professional manner from diagnosis through to maintenance treatment in order to work successfully with our patients: “We need to make a constant effort to be guided by what is beneficial for the patient, in the short and long term, by the patients’ legitimate needs and not by our own needs and feelings.”

NIWOP - No Implantology without Periodontology (W&H)