Wear Comparison of Twelve Manual Toothbrushes

Objectives: To compare the wear of the Sound Feelings SOFT Plain Toothbrush 47 tuft (flat bristles) (Group 1) versus eleven manual toothbrushes.
Methods: Twelve brand-new manual toothbrushes (n = 35 in each group) as presented in the table 1 were used for comparison. Each toothbrush was run on a toothbrushing simulator with a brushing force of 2N for approximately 2 hours to simulate 1 month of toothbrushing (9,333 strokes @ 45 degrees lingual of posterior teeth, 9,333 strokes on the top surface, and 9,333 strokes @ 45 degree buccal of posterior teeth), using the Bass technique on a quadrant typodont. Wear was measured by wear index and wear rating. The Wear index measures the degree of bristle splaying whereby the bristles spread apart and take on a permanent curvature. Wear rating is a subjective rating scale consisting of a series of four numbers increasing from zero to three. The Olympus SZX16 microscope was used to measure the wear rating, inputted into a formula, Figure 1, and averaged. The subjective wear seen as bristle splay/curling was also measured, using Table 2, and recorded. Comparison of the wear index and wear rating between Group 1 and each manual toothbrush was conducted using the Mann-Whitney test.
Results: Wear index and wear rating for all toothbrushes ranged from 0.03 to 0.34 and from 0.57 to 2.06, respectively. There was a significant difference in the wear index between each group and Group 1. The difference in the wear rating was significant between Group 1 and all groups other than Group 11.
Conclusions: Group 1 had the lowest wear rating and index among all the manual toothbrushes tested.