Dentists and staff should wear protective eyewear and disinfect between patients

An interesting article titled “Blood and saliva contamination on protective eyewear during dental treatment,” written by Nora Bergmann and et al. appears in the 2022 edition of Clinical Oral Investigations (Feb. 14, 2022). The article sought to explore the amount of aerosols, blood and saliva splashes on protective eyewear worn during dental treatments. The authors also looked at the effectiveness of disinfection of the eyewear. In the study the authors used forensic techniques to analyze 53 protective eyewear shields worn by dental staff during aerosol-producing dental treatments. The protective eyewear were worn during dental treatments like supragingival cleaning, carious cavity preparation, and subgingival periodontal instrumentation. To detect blood contamination, luminol was applied on the surface of the eyewear shilds. The authors found that a macroscopically detectable amount of contamination was found on 60.4% of the protective eyewear shields that had … Read more

Micro RNA and it’s role in Oral Cancer Detection

New research has emerged in Clinical Cancer Research which could aid in the diagnosis of oral cancer by looking at saliva, specifically MicroRNAs. MicroRNAs are molecules produced in cells that have the ability to simultaneously control activity and assess the behavior of multiple genes. Knowing the that microRNA is present in saliva represents a major step for the detection of oral cancer at an early stage. “It is a Holy Grail of cancer detection to be able to measure the presence of a cancer without a biopsy, so it is very appealing to think that we could detect a cancer-specific marker in a patient’s saliva,” said Jennifer Grandis, M.D. David T. Wong, D.M.D., D.M.Sc. and his colleagues measured microRNA levels in the saliva of 50 patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma and also in 50 healthy control patients. They were … Read more