Study of antimicrobial activity of medical-cosmetic products used in dentistry

Abstract

Introduction. According to statistics, the incidence of caries, gingivitis and periodontal disease in children and adults, both Ukraine and the world in general, is increasing. For medical and medical-cosmetic purposes in dentistry used medications on the basis of synthetic and natural substances that complement the basic therapy in the form of mouthwashes, toothpastes and elixirs. The purpose of this work is to study antimicrobial activity of commercially available medical-cosmetic products (mouthwashes, elixirs, and toothpastes) used for treatment of teeth and gums and comparison of integrated indexes with those of water-ethanol extracts from some plant raw material.

Materials and methods. Microbiological method of studying antimicrobial properties of eleven products, agar well diffusion method has been applied on standard microorganism test strains: Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 25923, Escherichia. coli ATCC 25922, Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC 27853, Proteus vulgaris ATCC 4636, Bacillus subtilis ATCC 6633, and Candida albicans ATCC 885/653; specific mathematic method for comparison of antimicrobial properties of products, vector theory, has been used. The microbial burden was 10⁷ CFU/mL of the medium and was determined in accordance with McFarland standard. 18-24-hour microorganism culture was taken into work.Mueller-HintonagarandMPA were used for bacteria. AgarSaburowasusedforCandidaalbicans. For comparison of the antimicrobial activity preparations between themselves, calculating an average value group of identical preparations and preparation selection of the most active among these authors used vector theory. Vector theory makes it possible to present antimicrobial activity of the medications on the basis of single test strains of microorganisms as a unified vector in n-dimensional space. In this case, the vector is characterized by the following: A - integrated index of antimicrobial activity (describes the "strength" of antimicrobial activity of the medication); r² - the square of the correlation coefficient (describes the spectrum of action of the medication on test strains of microorganisms studied), its range of values is from 0 to 1.

Results and discussion. High level of antimicrobial activity has been demonstrated by all medical-cosmetic products studied (mouthwashes, elixirs, and toothpastes). The averages of the complex index of antimicrobial activity for mouthwashes and elixirs are А=1.83, r²=0.93 and the ones for toothpastes are А=1.98, r²=0.98. It has been shown that some extracts from raw materials containing different kinds of hydroquinones, naphtoquinones, anthraquinones, alkaloids, and tannins have high potential to be used in complex phytochemical medications for dentistry as their main antimicrobial components.