Dentine hypersensitivity: most desensitising toothpastes help

The prevalence of dentine hypersensitivity is reported to be between 3-73% with a higher incidence in females. A number of desensitising toothpastes have been developed to reduce hypersensitivity.

The aim of this review is to assess the effectiveness of desensitising toothpastes in reducing dentine hypersensitivity.

Methods

Searches were conducted in the PubMed, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) and Embase databases for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) reporting the effects of toothpaste on dentine hypersensitivity. Only English language studies were considered. Two reviewers independently selected studies and extracted data. The Cochrane risk of bias tool was used to assess study quality. Standardised mean difference (SMD) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated.

Results

31 RCTs involving 2436 patients were included.
3 studies were considered to be high quality, 23 of moderate quality and 5 of low quality.
The desensitising effect was favoured in all tested toothpastes with the exception of strontium-containing toothpaste which showed no statistically significant effect in the meta-analysis.

Toothpaste containing	Number of studies (patients)	SMD (95%CI)	Heterogeneity ( I²)
Potassium	8 (513)	-1.28(-2.05 to -0.51)	93%
Stannous fluoride	6 (505)	-1.37(-2.30 to -0.44)	95%
Potassium and stannous fluoride	3 (232)	-2.50(-4.10 to -0.91)	95%
Strontium	4 (297)	0.05(-0.34 to 0.44)	64%
Calcium sodium phosphosilicate	4 (210)	-2.36(-3.72 to -1.00)	92%
Arginine	8 (679)	-3.25(-3.87 to -2.63)	86%

Conclusions

The authors concluded

The study reports that there is sufficient evidence to support the use of potassium-, stannous fluoride-, potassium and stannous fluoride-, calcium sodium phosphosilicate-, and arginine-containing desensitising toothpastes for dentin hypersensitivity, but not the use of strontium-containing desensitising toothpaste.

Commentary

There have been previous meta-analysis of desensitising toothpastes but that have focused on single types of toothpaste (See Links) and these have suggested that the evidence for effectiveness was limited particularly for new agents such as arginine. However, in the previous arginine review only two trials were included (Dental Elf 18^th Feb 2013) while this new review includes eight. The authors highlight that all the studies included in the review were sponsored by the manufacturers and the high levels of heterogeneity between the studies.