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Assessment of Effectiveness of Three Aerosol Mitigation Methods for Orthodontic Debonding
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- Author / Creator
- Souza Carvalho, Ramon
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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that our infection
prevention and control (IPC) knowledge has some glaring gaps on what best ways to
treat dental patients, leading to a flurry of research to understand the best mitigation
strategies to reduce aerosols. One of these strategies was the addition of a Local
Exhaust Ventilation System (LEV), similar to the ones used in other fields as
construction, soldering and chemical engineering. Hypothesis: In this manuscript, we
investigated the additional effect of adding aerosol capture methods during orthodontic
debonding to investigate their added effect to high-volume evacuator (the golden
standard). Materials and Methods: We investigated three mitigation methods during
orthodontic debonding: 1) HVE, 2) HVE and saliva ejector, 3) HVE, saliva ejector and a
LEV device, BriteHive, which shares the dental chair's HVE connector. We have used a
randomized clinical trial approach to investigate whether the three methods are
statistically equivalent from each other (effect size of 0.2 standard deviations ~ 16%
from each other). And measured the aerosols generated from the three mitigation
strategies using two devices, Optical Particle Sizer (OPS) which measures particle
concentration across 13 different particle sizes, and DustTrak, which measures mass
concentration across different particle matter, PM sizes. Results: Mass concentration
showed that HVE and Saliva Ejector strategy had the lowest number of statistically
significant PM sizes, with only the total PM size being statistically significant.
Conclusion: The addition of Saliva Ejector to HVE should supersede both HVE, and
HVE, Saliva Ejector and BriteHive as the gold standard. -
- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2023
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Science
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.