Introduction: Various studies have been conducted to assess the efficacy of commercially available herbal products to control dental diseases viz. dental caries, periodontal diseases and even reduce number of oral bacteria. Systematic reviews play an important role in aiding clinical decision making and help summarize the different results obtained in the all the various studies and reach a decisive conclusion.
Objectives: To evaluate the efficacy of herbal toothpastes and compare with conventional toothpastes in control of dental diseases.
Methodology: A literature review was performed using MeSH terms herbal tooth pastes, conventional toothpastes and comparative study. A total of 24 abstracts were found to be relevant out of which 9 were found to meet the inclusion criteria. These 9 randomized control studies were pooled in for the meta-analysis. The search was done from the Pub Med Central listed studies with the use of keywords with Boolean operators. The fixed effects model was used for analysis.
Results: This meta-analysis brings to light, the fact that a wide range of newer herbal products are now available but only a few have significant effect on dental health. This study found that six studies favour the use of herbal toothpastes and only three studies favour the use of conventional toothpastes, of the 9 studies that were analyzed.
Conclusion: Although it was found that the herbal toothpastes were more effective than the conventionally formulated toothpastes in the control of plaque and gingivitis, more studies are required under well controlled circumstances to prove that herbal products can equate or replace the conventionally used toothpastes compositions on a large scale basis.
Impact Factor
2022: 6.012
This work is licensed under a