Caries and periodontal diseases are the two most common dental diseases, affecting about 35% of the world's population. If caries and periodontal disease develop to a certain extent, it will cause permanent damage to teeth and gums. Therefore, early diagnosis and treatment of these diseases is necessary. However, most countries are faced with the problem of insufficient number of professional dentists and uneven distribution of health facilities resources, which makes dentists often only pay attention to patients' serious dental lesions at work, and easy to ignore the screening of early hidden lesions. The high cost also limits the routine dental examination for low-income people. Therefore, to develop a simple, convenient and low-cost method to realize the diagnosis and accurate location of early dental lesions is an urgent problem in the biomedical field.
Caries and periodontitis are often accompanied by food impaction and residues, which lead to the growth of bacteria in the oral cavity. When some sulfur-containing proteins are decomposed by anaerobic bacteria, they can produce volatile sulfur compounds (VSCS), such as hydrogen sulfide (H2S), methyl mercaptan (CH3SH), dimethyl sulfide (ch3sch3) and other metabolites. Therefore, early diagnosis of caries and periodontitis can be achieved by detecting VSCS. However, the current detection methods mainly focus on the VSCS in the exhaled gas, and can not provide detailed information such as the location and degree of lesions. Therefore, the development of a detection method to accurately reflect the location of tooth lesions (especially hidden lesions) is very valuable.
Zhou Jianhua group of School of biomedical engineering of Sun Yat sen University and his collaborator Yu shreke Zhang, Professor of Harvard University School of medicine, aimed at this problem, using ZnO PDMS composite nano materials to prepare wearable fluorescent dental cover, and by detecting the release of local VSCS, the precise location of patients' teeth lesions was realized. The results show that the ZnO PDMS teeth can produce highly sensitive and selective response to VSCS (especially H2S), which is characterized by fluorescence quenching at the corresponding position. At the same time, ZnO PDMS showed high fluorescence stability, good biocompatibility and low toxicity in physiological environment. Furthermore, through the analysis of the image of the ZnO PDMS braces worn by the subjects, the position of the teeth lesions (including caries and concealed lesions) of the subjects can be accurately located. The results were published on advanced materials (DOI: 10.1002 / ADMA. 202000060).
In general, this kind of wearable fluorescent ZnO PDMS braces has the following characteristics: (1) low cost, simple preparation and long-term stability; (2) accurate location of hidden lesions on each tooth; (3) transparent appearance, soft material and high compliance of patients. This makes this kind of braces have the potential of large-scale application in preliminary screening and accurate location of tooth lesions. In addition, because ZnO PDMS is a porous inert material with drug loading potential, it is expected to develop a diagnosis and treatment platform with both diagnostic and therapeutic functions based on the braces. In the future, the application scope of this technology can be extended from dental health care to other fields, such as oral biochemical detection, respiratory and gastrointestinal disease diagnosis, as well as the development of other wearable detection devices related to public health.
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